Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. He there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland. I'mond executive producer with I Heart Radio. And how the tech are you? This time for the tech news for Tuesday, January two thousand twenty three. As I mentioned last week, c e S recently happened. That's the big consumer tech trade show that takes place in Las Vegas, Nevada. And while I did not go this year, I did read up on some of the stuff shown off and thought i'd give just a quick glimpse at a few things that caught my eye. And first up is a nineties seven inch television because of course it caught my eye because it blocks everything else that you could be looking at that is enormous. The TV comes from l G and it's an O LED television and nineties seven oh LED TV. It also comes in a wireless version where you can connect the television to your various components without you know, having wires go everywhere. Now, I have no idea how much that wireless version will cost if it does actually become a true consumer product as opposed to you know, kind of a concept or proof, you know, a prototype or something. But the wired version the TV is said to come out and around twenty five thousand dollars. It's outside of my price range for sure. Still. I can actually remember going to c E S back when the largest oh LED screens you'd see were like eight inches, when they were just kind of showing off what oh Led could do, Like there was no such thing as an no LED t V at that point. They had little displays sometimes like bendable displays, but they were tie need. So this is really an enormous leap from where the technology was when I first started going to c e S. Samsung meanwhile, showed off a seventy seven inch q d oh Lad television, so there were no there's no shortage of large TVs boasting great color representation and resolution. So again, just really phenomenal when you when you've been going long enough so that you saw where the technology was when you started, versus where it is now. Like I said before, you would never even see a television with an old screen, and now you were looking at, you know, displays that are creeping up to the hundred inch size, which is just unfathomable to me. Yeah, pretty exciting stuff. A R and VR also had some entries at c E S three. Loomis l U m u S showed off their latest design for a OUR glasses and they look kind of like Black Frame I glasses, actually a lot like them. Wired reports that they felt like they were a little bit larger than your typical glasses are, but they otherwise look pretty darn normal. Now, Loomas is in the business of supplying smart display technology to other manufacturers to incorporate into their products, so it's not like we're gonna see a Loomis branded set of a R glasses anytime soon. Instead, you might end up with a Loomis display built into some other product, like whether it's a smart window or a windshield or something along those lines. Meanwhile, HTC introduced the viv x R Elite VR headset. It's got a sleeker form factor, looks a little little way less chunky than earlier VR headsets. It's also reportedly less than half the weight of the meta Quest Pro headset, so it's pretty lightweight. And keep in mind the meta Quest Pro is meta slash, Facebook's attempt to create a headset that professionals would use in order in business settings, and if you have a headset like that, then you want it to be lightweight, because if you're wearing it a lot, like if you're working a normal work day, then you're gonna be using your headset a lot. You definitely don't want it to be too heavy. So it sounds like this one is pretty pretty sleek in that regard, and it sounded like it's a fairly impressive piece of technology, and it better be because it sure ain't cheap. It'll be coming to market in late February for the princely sum of one thousand dollars, So that's real expensive. You know, it's like the price of a an entry level or maybe you could say like a medium level gaming PC. It's nowhere close to what you would pay if you're wanting to go top of the line, like that's you're getting into the multiple thousands of dollars then, But a thousand bucks that's a lot to spend on what most people look at as a peripheral as opposed to like a computer. So yeah, I don't know if this is going to help usher in a wider acceptance of VR. It might be really impressive and work really well, but at that price point, I think it's still going to prevent a lot of people from jumping into the field, but I could be wrong. I've been skeptical about VR becoming a big thing, Like I've always thought that it's more of a niche technology, that it has its place, and that you can create really incredible experiences for VR. But because of things like the cost, as well as the fact that some people just get motion sick while they're using the technology, means that you're probably not gonna see it become the mainstream technology that say, replaces computers or becomes the next revolution in computing after the mobile revolution. Every year it's c e s. There are always gadgets that get attention because they're different from everything else. They're not necessarily better or even useful, but they're different, and then that gets a lot of attention because people, frankly, reporters get tired of covering televisions and cars and audio systems. Like there's certain categories at CES that are always represented, and even if you see something that's really good, it's like a jump ahead of what the previous models have been, the fact that you've been covering that for years just means that you're kind of tired of it, so when something different comes along, people notice. I'm actually reminded of the haptic fork from several years ago. This was a fork that had a motor built into the handle, and the motor would cause the fork to vibrate and and make food fall off the fork if it detected you were trying to eat too quickly. It was a way to try and force you to slow down your eating. Well. This year, one thing that I saw a lot of coverage on at c e S was the we Things you Scan. Now, this is a device. It's a little cartridge thing that fits inside your toilet and it analyzes your p So the idea is that this thing can analyze urine and then report back via an app on things like whether or not you're properly hydrated, or maybe you're lacking some specific nutrients, or maybe you're using it to track your hormone cycle because you and your partner want to have a baby and this can help track cycles for that kind of thing. There's no one cartridge it fits all solution here. It's not like it's not like making the claims of Farinus, where one thing can cover all eventualities. So instead you have to choose the cartridge that applies to whatever it is you want to measure, and then on top of that, you have to subscribe to the service. So there's a subscription fee on top of the cartridge fee to use the service. The cartridges are going to cost around six hundred dollars a pop. I'm not sure what the monthly subscription fee is going to be. I will say that while I saw a lot of outlets report on this technology, it actually surprised me that not nearly as many pointed out the concerns that Cindy Cone of the Electronic Frontier Foundation raised, namely that anytime you're talking about medical information and you're talking about an app ecosystem, you need to be concerned about data security and privacy. So Cone asks a really good question, is there anything being done with that data beyond the analysis? Could the we Things company leverage that data for other purposes? Could it possibly sell that information to other companies? And in the wake of a controversial Supreme Court decision here in the US last year, could it mean that state governments that restrict women's access to things like abortion use data collected by we Things to kind of monitor women becomes very invasive, very handmade's tale when you start getting into this now. For their part, We Things later responded to this criticism, saying that the product and service will be subject to company data private CE policies, so U big relief there. And last week I mentioned there would likely be a few flying cars on display at CES. Typically these take the form of what looks like just a very large drone with four or more rotors, so like your typical quad copter design quad copter only refers to ones that four rotors, but you know, big enough so that you could fit one or two people into like a cockpit that's in the center of these things. That's what most flying cars look like. But one thing I didn't anticipate was a quote unquote flying boat that's not really flying, but that's kind of what c net called it. It is the Candela C eight. It's an electric speedboat, so it is an electric vehicle and it uses hydrofoils. So these are like wing like structures that submerge under the water while the rest of the boat lifts up off the surface of the of the sea as you start to move up to speed, and the hydrofoils act like wings, but instead of the fluid being air, the fluid is actually the water of the sea, and this reduces the amount of surface area that actually makes contact with the water. It means that the boat can go pretty darn fast, like around thirty four miles per hour. That's really a good clip for a boat. But the C eight also has some other tricks up its sleeve. Because hydrofoils, they're cool, but they're not new. Uh. Some of the other things that the C eight has include a self piloting feature, so sort of like Tesla's autopilot that's meant to keep the boat on a set course. So let's say that you are, you know, going from one island to another. It's gonna take about three hours. You set the course and the boat keeps you on that and it detects when you start drifting due to other things like wind or current that kind of stuff, and can keep you on the right path. It also has tons of sensors so that the boat can keep itself stable and balanced, which is important when you're raised up on hydrofoils. And it will only set you back three hundred ninety thousand dollars. Now, of course, there were a lot of other items on display at c E S three, But since I didn't go and can only form opinions based on coverage, I'm gonna just limited to those things that thought were kind of neat. Honestly, there's so much more for me to read up on. I I'm still unaware of a lot of stuff that was at c E S. So I'm going to segue into some other news, But first, let's take a quick break. Okay, we're back over in China. Some recent Tesla customers are really really unhappy. Why. Well, recently, Tesla marked down the prices of various vehicles it was selling in China by several thousand dollars. So the amount of markdown really depends upon the specific model of car, but all of them got big price cuts. However, that means that the folks who purchased a Tesla in China before the company made this markdown had paid an earlier higher price for their cars. Now they're upset that if they had just waited a little bit and then purchased their vehicle after the cuts, they could have done so for a decent discount. And yeah, you know, this kind of buyer's remorse is pretty common. I know that I have personally kicked myself for buying something that later went on sale, like not long after I bought it, and I think, gosh, if only I had waited, I could have saved you know, however much money. But hindsight, right, you had no way of knowing necessarily at the time when you make a purchase that a week or a month later, it's going to be significantly cheaper unless you have like insider information, you just don't know. But for some customers in Chengdu, China, things went beyond buyer's remorse because mers reportedly stormed the Tesla dealership. They got inside, they vandalized the dealership. They damaged one of the electric vehicles on display and a TV that was on display. They stole some stuff allegedly uh. They also left behind a list of demands, which includes stuff like a free lifetime subscription to the full self driving feature that Tesla offers, plus like ten million Tesla points. I'm unfamiliar with Tesla points, so I need to look into that to see what. I'm sure it's a loyalty thing, but like, what are Tesla points for. They also wanted extended warranties that kind of thing. Tesla the dealership said, hey, we're sorry. There's not like a program in place to give you a refund or to give you a rebate based upon the change in price. That's just not how this works. And the company, I don't think is very likely to meet any of these demands. But the Chinese media is reporting the matters relating to quote unquote customer rights as opposed to reporting on this is like acts of vandalism. Uh, and that could indicate that Tesla is gonna have a tough time handling pr in China in the short term. Like when I hear this story. As much as I don't like Tesla, I think, well, it's unfortunate when you buy something and then the next week it goes down in price. That's that stinks. It's never fun for that to happen to you. But it's not like the company owes you anything like you just it was just bad luck, bad timing. Um. So I really don't feel that Tesla is in the wrong here, and it it's weird that the media is referencing this as customer rights. Although China is a very different kind of country than the United States, so maybe that has a big part of it, but yeah, that's not a not a great indication of a solid, you know, reputation for Tesla within China. Next up, social media companies including Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and snapchat, among others, are facing a new lawsuit, this time from the Seattle Public School System. Seattle is in Washington State here in the United States. The lawsuit charges that these social platforms have violated a public nuisance law that they are designed for the purposes of quote, hooking tens of millions of students across the country into positive feedback loops of excessive use and abuse of defendants social media platforms end quote. And you know that's kind of hard to deny because every social network out there has worked to find ways to keep users engaged on their platforms. That's what's profitable, and it's way less profitable for someone to pop into your service, take a look and then pop out. You want those eyeballs to stay glued to your service for as long as you can possibly keep them, so you purposefully design your service to encourage extended engagement by creating these kinds of feedback loops that psychologically reward the user for sticking with the service. From the network side, you can argue this is all in an effort to provide the best experience to the user, Like that's how you can frame it, like we're just trying to give the user the best possible experience. However, the flip side of looking at this is to say it's really an effort to make the user increasingly dependent upon the service that they become kind of addicted to it. Further, the complaint alleges that the networks have perpetuated harm on young users, citing research and reports about how the use of social media can be associated with various mental health issues like depression, anxiety, suicide, eating disorders, that kind of thing. Now, whether the court system will also find that these companies are responsible for perpetuating harm and hooking people into the system remains to be seen, because we're just at the very beginning of this process and I think be very hard to argue against it. I suspect that what we'll see as a settlement at some point, because you know, we've even seen internal documents from within Facebook slash Meta that essentially support at least some of these arguments, And you know, when your company's internal documents appear to support the allegations made against you, that becomes difficult to defend against. So we'll have to see. I mean, you never know. It all depends upon the court and how arguments are framed. So it's not like it's a done deal one way or the other yet. Next we're gonna talk about AI. In fact, we're gonna talk a lot about AI. I think stories about AI will be a huge thing throughout three. Chat gpt kind of got things fired up last November, and our first story about AI relates to the AI chat butt that has people creating machine generated children's book as teachers worried about students using it to cheat. You know, it goes from everything from interesting distraction to the downfall of society. And that of course is chat GPT. Reuter's reports that Microsoft is in talks with open Ai that's the group that owns and operates chat gpt, and that Microsoft plans to invest up to ten billion with a B dollars in open Ai. This deal would, reported lea see Microsoft ultimately take a forty nine steak in open ai, and other investors would take up the other and the final two percent. Because if you add nine. You do not get a hundred. I tried multiple times. I just couldn't get there. Now, the final two percent would belong to open aies nonprofit parent company. And one thing I did not realize but absolutely should have known. I mean maybe I knew it at one point and I just forgot. But it's that open Ai was originally founded by Sam Altman and Elon Musk. And once you hear that Elon Musk is involved in all that disruptive stuff that involves like arts and education, makes perfect sense because Elon Musk likes to stir uh poo poo, will say, I won't use the rude word for it, but yeah, Elon Musk is uh. I'm sure he thinks of it as being a disruptor, which I guess is, you know, putting a positive spin on it. But he wrecks shop by the way I put it. And yeah, and that includes creating things or funding things he doesn't. Musk is not an engineer, but he funds things that end up causing lots of headaches for established institutions and established ways of doing things. And frequently, not always, but frequently, the solution proposed by Musk is not superior to whatever was happening before it. So yeah, not a big surprise in the sense of like, oh, well that all fits. But yeah, I somehow missed that Elon musk Get co founded open Ai. Now that's not the only Microsoft AI story that I have today. Another deals with a program called vol E v A L L dash E. Now I can only assume that was meant as a reference to the Pixar film Wally, But voll E is an AI system that can synthesize voices like any voice. So all it takes is an audio sample of about three seconds of any voice. And not only that, Volley can synthesize speech that mimics the emotional tone and the acoustics that were present when the speaker created the sample. So if you had three seconds of someone totally losing their temper and say a tiled bathroom, the synthesized audio would likely sound livid and in a place that has a lot of hard services and echo to it. Or if someone were chipper and happy than they were in a well insulated space for sound, then it would come through the same way in the synthesized audio. So in theory, you could collect audio samples of someone in different emotional states, and then using text to speech and then switching to preserve the right tone. You could use this tool to produce like a moving monologue that the actual person has never said in their entire life. This is both fascinating and it's kind of scary. It's apparently not always convincing. I have not actually heard a lot of samples from this, so I haven't had a lot of personal experience with it. But from what I've read, at least in some cases you can tell, oh, this was machine generated, but in others there are some synthesized passages that are actually sound like they were read by the person who supply the original audio sample, and that you could not tell the difference. Now, Microsoft already recognizes how this kind of tool could cause serious problems, as Ours Technically reports researchers have written quote. Since vol E could synthesize speech that maintains speaker identity, it may carry potential risks in misuse of the model, such as spoofing voice identification or impersonating a specific speaker. To mitigate such risks, it is possible to build a detection model to discriminate whether an audio clip was synthesized by VOLI. We will also put Microsoft AI principles into practice when further developing the models. End quote. Also, Microsoft is not sharing this code that can help reduce the threat of someone using it to make it sound like. Let's say a famous person said things they never actually said. And when you consider the extent to which trolls on the Internet will go to hurt someone just for the lulls, this is a very good thing because I can only imagine them using a tool like this to make someone they don't like appear to say the absolutely worst stuff you can imagine. I'm talking like, truly vile things. That would be the first thing I would expect of this tool were to be publicly accessible, and by preserving emotional tone, it could even sound like the person was happy while they were saying the worst things you can imagine, which is a big old yuck. All Right, I've got a couple more stories I want to finish out with, but before we get to those, let's take another quick break. Hey, we're back, and we got a couple more AI stories before we move on to some other stuff. And these involve the organization do not pay. So this group does a lot of consumer advocacy kind of work. They got their start as a service that help people identify I and then cancel subscriptions to stuff that they rarely or never use. So you might create an account and then think, oh, hey, I haven't watched anything on this streaming platform and months why am I still paying for it? And then you want to bail and Do Not Pay would help you do that kind of thing. Well, something else the company has been experimenting with is using AI to help people when they have to appear in court, and apparently coming up next month, the organization is working with a defendant as they have to go to traffic court to defend themselves. The defendant is going to wear an ear piece and the AI will generate responses for the defendant to repeat while they're in court. Now, there are a few other details, but it's pretty scarce because Do not Pay wishes to preserve the defendants privacy, which makes total sense. We only know it's not going to take place in a traffic court in California, and Do not Pay has previously used AI to help people fight unfair parking tickets and found a sixty six US rate across a quarter of a million cases with that, so that usually involved AI writing generating a letter in an effort to fight a parking ticket, which is not a bad success rate six four percent. But this would be the first time that AI would actually be used in an in person court case to boost someone's defense UH strategies, and the law hasn't exactly been ahead of the game. When it comes to a I probably will not surprise you that there isn't any law against accepting AI powered assistance while appearing at trial, at least not yet, because no one ever thought that that was going to be a thing, or at least not a thing right now. So there's nothing preventing someone from doing this because no one's actually passed the law to prevent it. But then, traffic court is small potatoes because it's it's pretty low stakes. It's usually over a matter that involves some money, but it's not that much money, at least not in the grand scheme of things. It might be a lot for the person who has to pay a fine, but in the grand scheme it's never that huge, and frequently cases can end up being tossed out just because the officer who wrote the ticket fails to show up to court. If the officer doesn't show up, then the person charged as just gets to go. But on the flip side, Do Not Pay is perhaps cheekily seeking to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court of the United States. So the CEO of Do Not Pay tweeted, because of course this was in a tweet, that the company would pay a million dollars to any lawyer scheduled to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court, and this lawyer, in return for accepting the million dollars, would agree to wear some wireless ear buds like air pods and then follow the directions of the AI lawyer butt. The CEO says he's serious about this offwerare, but I don't think anyone's going to take him up on it, because while a million dollars is a lot of money, I don't think any lawyer wants to be the one who has their name associated with a potential publicity disaster. The things don't go well, then your name could forever be associated with this weird AI experiment. And I think most lawyers who are arguing in front of the Supreme Court wish to preserve their reputation to some degree. Plus there are rules about the kinds of stuff you can actually bring into the Supreme Court that includes there's a ban on electronic devices while the court is in session. So it's questionable about whether this would even be allowed in the first place, just on a basic level. So while the offer is sure to get some attention, I don't think there's any real chance of someone pouncing on it. But does illustrate how AI is going to continue to be a really big topic this year. All right, Switching away from AI across the pond in the UK, new legislation now requires builders to include gigabit Internet connections on any new home construction, which is a really cool thing. Any new home built in the UK has to have gigabit Internet connection is built into it. Uh. This of course doesn't mean that everyone will actually have access to gigabit Internet because you still have to have the service available in the area. You still have to pay for that service, but it will be possible. At least it won't be because your home lacks the connection. The connection will be built into the home. In addition, the legislation is going to make it easier for people in existing structures to get gigabit connections installed now. Easy does not mean cheap because the legislation is seeking for a cab a spending cap on how much it would cost to install connections into existing buildings. But that cap is high. It's like two thousand pounds. That's a lot of money, um, But the UK government estimates that around of installations would fall under such a cap anyway. So the cap is really there to prevent people who are living in out of the way places like rural areas where there's very little infrastructure. It's it's meant to prevent them from being victimized by having a h price tags they are just way too high to ever pay to have that connectivity built into them. So yeah, it's really expensive, but it's also meant to be a check on providers so that they can't bleed someone dry just because they happen to live out in the middle of nowhere. The legislation doesn't guarantee gigabit speed connectivity, uh, just the actual connections, which is there is a difference right the service and the actual hardware. So if there is no gigabit service in the region, then whatever is fastest will end up taking its place. The legislation also holds landlord's accountable too. If a renter wants to upgrade to gigabit connectivity within their apartment, they would contact a broadband provider, but because they don't own their their structure, like if they're living in an apartment or or a rented house or whatever, then the provider has to reach out to land words first to get permission, and nearly half of such requests went unanswered last year. But now if a landlord does not respond within thirty five days of receiving such a request from a broadband provider, the provider can take the matter to court to get access rights to the rented structure. By the way, reading up on what the broadband situation is like in the UK just reminded me how badly we have it here in the United States, where there is a distinct lack of competition among providers in most markets. Like the report I was reading, the person said there was like a hundred different providers they could choose from. That's not the case in the United States. Like, for instance, where I live, there is one provider who offers service that is more than two hundred megabits per second, So I'm not even in the gigabit per second area, and in the megabits per second, the next fastest is at thirty megabits per second. And that's the two major provide letters in this area, and all the other providers that are available in this area. Their services are built on top of the of the infrastructure provided by the first two choices. So there's no competition in the United States, and it's ridiculous that we continue to pretend like there is. Uh, that's me getting on my high horse about that and being irritated at how poorly this has been handled by regulatory agencies here in the United States. And I think it's ridiculous that I live in the city of Atlanta and I can't get access to gig a bit Internet. Um. And you should be upset too, because that affects the show. You know, this show, so it's it's affecting you too. It's not just me, alright, I'm done. Last year, one of the news stories that I covered was about how BMW was irritating people by locking certain car features behind subscription services, like heated car seats. So the upsetting thing is that these features typically are already present in the val right the vehicle can already do the thing that the subscription covers. It's just that the feature is switched off unless the owner pays a subscription to activate them. And a lot of people have the opinion that if a feature is in the vehicle, it should just be accessible upon purchase. I think that's our reasonable opinion. You could offer vehicles to have the feature as an option, and you can have other versions of the vehicle that do not have that option, and that can be reflected in the sticker price of the individual cars. But to have something built into a car that works but it's turned off by default, well that's frustrating for a lot of folks. And BMW is doubling down on that. Actually, it's more than doubling down on that. Here in the United States, BMW has five features that are locked behind subscription services. This is new in the US. They include Parking Assistant, Professional Traffic Camera, driving US Stance plus, drive recorder, and remote engine start. So, for example, if you wanted a one year subscription so that you could start your engine remotely, that would set you back a hundred five dollars For the year, you could pay two hundred fifty dollars at pre purchased three years of service, or if you wanted a lifetime subscription to Remote Engine Start for that specific BMW as long as you owned it, that would cost you three thirty dollars. Otherwise it's a ten bucks a month service. Personally, I look forward to the dystopian future where stuff like windshield wipers and turn signals are also subscription based, except of course, here in Atlanta, most folks would be well ahead of the curve on saving money because they don't know what turn signals are for anyway. Finally, we have a right to Repair update. I'll actually be doing an episode kind of as an update to write to repair in its current status here in the United States pretty soon. But one of the big holdouts on right to repair has recently made some concessions. That holdout is John Dear. It's a company that's best known as making farming equipment. They also make things like lawnmowers and that kind of stuff. Traditionally, John Deer lockdown its equipment so that farmers had no choice but to take their stuff to authorized John Deer service facilities, and that could sometimes be more expensive than an independent repair shop. Like if you've ever had a car, and you've looked at prices of taking that car to a dealership's service center versus going to an independent repair shop, you might see, oh, I could save a lot more money if I go to the independent place. Well, that same thing is true with other types of equipment as well, and John Deere tried very hard to make sure that people could not have an alternative. They used a few different approaches to discourage or outright prevent someone from going anywhere besides a John Dear licensed service facility. And this is because locking someone into an ecosystem of service and repairs creates an ongoing revenue stream. So you're not just selling someone a tractor, you're also essentially selling them all their maintenance and repair Moving forward, it might be in the form of securing licensing agreements with various service centers around the region. But yeah, this is a way to make more money rather than just rely on hardware sales. But on Sunday, the companies signed a memorandum of understanding with the American Farm Bureau Federation and now farmers and independent repair shops will be allowed to access stuff like repair manuals, tools and parts needed to perform specific kinds of repairs on specific kinds of equipment. But in return, the Bureau agreed that farmers and independent repair shops would maintain trade secrets, they would not divulge them, and they also promised not to override things like safety features and that kind of stuff. In other words, you can't soup up your actors so that it can travel the length of the field in like one tenth the normal time or anything like that, because that would be dangerous. But this is a pretty big win for the right to repair. Okay, that's the news I have for you for Tuesday, January twenty three. Will be back later this week with some more news, assuming that stuff happens, and I mean it keeps that keeps doing that, so I guess that's gonna be a thing. And if you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me. There are a couple of different ways you can do it. One is you can download the I Heart radio app. It's free to use. It's free to download. You just type tech stuff into the little search feature that will take you to the tech Stuff podcast page and you click on that and you'll see there's a little microphone icon in there. If you click on that, you can leave me a voice message up to thirty seconds in length, or if you prefer, you can send me your thoughts in Twitter form. The handle for the show is tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Yes. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. He there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland. I'mond executive producer with I Heart Radio. And how the tech are you? This time for the tech news for Tuesday, January two thousand twenty three. As I mentioned last week, c e S recently happened. That's the big consumer tech trade show that takes place in Las Vegas, Nevada. And while I did not go this year, I did read up on some of the stuff shown off and thought i'd give just a quick glimpse at a few things that caught my eye. And first up is a nineties seven inch television because of course it caught my eye because it blocks everything else that you could be looking at that is enormous. The TV comes from l G and it's an O LED television and nineties seven oh LED TV. It also comes in a wireless version where you can connect the television to your various components without you know, having wires go everywhere. Now, I have no idea how much that wireless version will cost if it does actually become a true consumer product as opposed to you know, kind of a concept or proof, you know, a prototype or something. But the wired version the TV is said to come out and around twenty five thousand dollars. It's outside of my price range for sure. Still. I can actually remember going to c E S back when the largest oh LED screens you'd see were like eight inches, when they were just kind of showing off what oh Led could do, Like there was no such thing as an no LED t V at that point. They had little displays sometimes like bendable displays, but they were tie need. So this is really an enormous leap from where the technology was when I first started going to c e S. Samsung meanwhile, showed off a seventy seven inch q d oh Lad television, so there were no there's no shortage of large TVs boasting great color representation and resolution. So again, just really phenomenal when you when you've been going long enough so that you saw where the technology was when you started, versus where it is now. Like I said before, you would never even see a television with an old screen, and now you were looking at, you know, displays that are creeping up to the hundred inch size, which is just unfathomable to me. Yeah, pretty exciting stuff. A R and VR also had some entries at c E S three. Loomis l U m u S showed off their latest design for a OUR glasses and they look kind of like Black Frame I glasses, actually a lot like them. Wired reports that they felt like they were a little bit larger than your typical glasses are, but they otherwise look pretty darn normal. Now, Loomas is in the business of supplying smart display technology to other manufacturers to incorporate into their products, so it's not like we're gonna see a Loomis branded set of a R glasses anytime soon. Instead, you might end up with a Loomis display built into some other product, like whether it's a smart window or a windshield or something along those lines. Meanwhile, HTC introduced the viv x R Elite VR headset. It's got a sleeker form factor, looks a little little way less chunky than earlier VR headsets. It's also reportedly less than half the weight of the meta Quest Pro headset, so it's pretty lightweight. And keep in mind the meta Quest Pro is meta slash, Facebook's attempt to create a headset that professionals would use in order in business settings, and if you have a headset like that, then you want it to be lightweight, because if you're wearing it a lot, like if you're working a normal work day, then you're gonna be using your headset a lot. You definitely don't want it to be too heavy. So it sounds like this one is pretty pretty sleek in that regard, and it sounded like it's a fairly impressive piece of technology, and it better be because it sure ain't cheap. It'll be coming to market in late February for the princely sum of one thousand dollars, So that's real expensive. You know, it's like the price of a an entry level or maybe you could say like a medium level gaming PC. It's nowhere close to what you would pay if you're wanting to go top of the line, like that's you're getting into the multiple thousands of dollars then, But a thousand bucks that's a lot to spend on what most people look at as a peripheral as opposed to like a computer. So yeah, I don't know if this is going to help usher in a wider acceptance of VR. It might be really impressive and work really well, but at that price point, I think it's still going to prevent a lot of people from jumping into the field, but I could be wrong. I've been skeptical about VR becoming a big thing, Like I've always thought that it's more of a niche technology, that it has its place, and that you can create really incredible experiences for VR. But because of things like the cost, as well as the fact that some people just get motion sick while they're using the technology, means that you're probably not gonna see it become the mainstream technology that say, replaces computers or becomes the next revolution in computing after the mobile revolution. Every year it's c e s. There are always gadgets that get attention because they're different from everything else. They're not necessarily better or even useful, but they're different, and then that gets a lot of attention because people, frankly, reporters get tired of covering televisions and cars and audio systems. Like there's certain categories at CES that are always represented, and even if you see something that's really good, it's like a jump ahead of what the previous models have been, the fact that you've been covering that for years just means that you're kind of tired of it, so when something different comes along, people notice. I'm actually reminded of the haptic fork from several years ago. This was a fork that had a motor built into the handle, and the motor would cause the fork to vibrate and and make food fall off the fork if it detected you were trying to eat too quickly. It was a way to try and force you to slow down your eating. Well. This year, one thing that I saw a lot of coverage on at c e S was the we Things you Scan. Now, this is a device. It's a little cartridge thing that fits inside your toilet and it analyzes your p So the idea is that this thing can analyze urine and then report back via an app on things like whether or not you're properly hydrated, or maybe you're lacking some specific nutrients, or maybe you're using it to track your hormone cycle because you and your partner want to have a baby and this can help track cycles for that kind of thing. There's no one cartridge it fits all solution here. It's not like it's not like making the claims of Farinus, where one thing can cover all eventualities. So instead you have to choose the cartridge that applies to whatever it is you want to measure, and then on top of that, you have to subscribe to the service. So there's a subscription fee on top of the cartridge fee to use the service. The cartridges are going to cost around six hundred dollars a pop. I'm not sure what the monthly subscription fee is going to be. I will say that while I saw a lot of outlets report on this technology, it actually surprised me that not nearly as many pointed out the concerns that Cindy Cone of the Electronic Frontier Foundation raised, namely that anytime you're talking about medical information and you're talking about an app ecosystem, you need to be concerned about data security and privacy. So Cone asks a really good question, is there anything being done with that data beyond the analysis? Could the we Things company leverage that data for other purposes? Could it possibly sell that information to other companies? And in the wake of a controversial Supreme Court decision here in the US last year, could it mean that state governments that restrict women's access to things like abortion use data collected by we Things to kind of monitor women becomes very invasive, very handmade's tale when you start getting into this now. For their part, We Things later responded to this criticism, saying that the product and service will be subject to company data private CE policies, so U big relief there. And last week I mentioned there would likely be a few flying cars on display at CES. Typically these take the form of what looks like just a very large drone with four or more rotors, so like your typical quad copter design quad copter only refers to ones that four rotors, but you know, big enough so that you could fit one or two people into like a cockpit that's in the center of these things. That's what most flying cars look like. But one thing I didn't anticipate was a quote unquote flying boat that's not really flying, but that's kind of what c net called it. It is the Candela C eight. It's an electric speedboat, so it is an electric vehicle and it uses hydrofoils. So these are like wing like structures that submerge under the water while the rest of the boat lifts up off the surface of the of the sea as you start to move up to speed, and the hydrofoils act like wings, but instead of the fluid being air, the fluid is actually the water of the sea, and this reduces the amount of surface area that actually makes contact with the water. It means that the boat can go pretty darn fast, like around thirty four miles per hour. That's really a good clip for a boat. But the C eight also has some other tricks up its sleeve. Because hydrofoils, they're cool, but they're not new. Uh. Some of the other things that the C eight has include a self piloting feature, so sort of like Tesla's autopilot that's meant to keep the boat on a set course. So let's say that you are, you know, going from one island to another. It's gonna take about three hours. You set the course and the boat keeps you on that and it detects when you start drifting due to other things like wind or current that kind of stuff, and can keep you on the right path. It also has tons of sensors so that the boat can keep itself stable and balanced, which is important when you're raised up on hydrofoils. And it will only set you back three hundred ninety thousand dollars. Now, of course, there were a lot of other items on display at c E S three, But since I didn't go and can only form opinions based on coverage, I'm gonna just limited to those things that thought were kind of neat. Honestly, there's so much more for me to read up on. I I'm still unaware of a lot of stuff that was at c E S. So I'm going to segue into some other news, But first, let's take a quick break. Okay, we're back over in China. Some recent Tesla customers are really really unhappy. Why. Well, recently, Tesla marked down the prices of various vehicles it was selling in China by several thousand dollars. So the amount of markdown really depends upon the specific model of car, but all of them got big price cuts. However, that means that the folks who purchased a Tesla in China before the company made this markdown had paid an earlier higher price for their cars. Now they're upset that if they had just waited a little bit and then purchased their vehicle after the cuts, they could have done so for a decent discount. And yeah, you know, this kind of buyer's remorse is pretty common. I know that I have personally kicked myself for buying something that later went on sale, like not long after I bought it, and I think, gosh, if only I had waited, I could have saved you know, however much money. But hindsight, right, you had no way of knowing necessarily at the time when you make a purchase that a week or a month later, it's going to be significantly cheaper unless you have like insider information, you just don't know. But for some customers in Chengdu, China, things went beyond buyer's remorse because mers reportedly stormed the Tesla dealership. They got inside, they vandalized the dealership. They damaged one of the electric vehicles on display and a TV that was on display. They stole some stuff allegedly uh. They also left behind a list of demands, which includes stuff like a free lifetime subscription to the full self driving feature that Tesla offers, plus like ten million Tesla points. I'm unfamiliar with Tesla points, so I need to look into that to see what. I'm sure it's a loyalty thing, but like, what are Tesla points for. They also wanted extended warranties that kind of thing. Tesla the dealership said, hey, we're sorry. There's not like a program in place to give you a refund or to give you a rebate based upon the change in price. That's just not how this works. And the company, I don't think is very likely to meet any of these demands. But the Chinese media is reporting the matters relating to quote unquote customer rights as opposed to reporting on this is like acts of vandalism. Uh, and that could indicate that Tesla is gonna have a tough time handling pr in China in the short term. Like when I hear this story. As much as I don't like Tesla, I think, well, it's unfortunate when you buy something and then the next week it goes down in price. That's that stinks. It's never fun for that to happen to you. But it's not like the company owes you anything like you just it was just bad luck, bad timing. Um. So I really don't feel that Tesla is in the wrong here, and it it's weird that the media is referencing this as customer rights. Although China is a very different kind of country than the United States, so maybe that has a big part of it, but yeah, that's not a not a great indication of a solid, you know, reputation for Tesla within China. Next up, social media companies including Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and snapchat, among others, are facing a new lawsuit, this time from the Seattle Public School System. Seattle is in Washington State here in the United States. The lawsuit charges that these social platforms have violated a public nuisance law that they are designed for the purposes of quote, hooking tens of millions of students across the country into positive feedback loops of excessive use and abuse of defendants social media platforms end quote. And you know that's kind of hard to deny because every social network out there has worked to find ways to keep users engaged on their platforms. That's what's profitable, and it's way less profitable for someone to pop into your service, take a look and then pop out. You want those eyeballs to stay glued to your service for as long as you can possibly keep them, so you purposefully design your service to encourage extended engagement by creating these kinds of feedback loops that psychologically reward the user for sticking with the service. From the network side, you can argue this is all in an effort to provide the best experience to the user, Like that's how you can frame it, like we're just trying to give the user the best possible experience. However, the flip side of looking at this is to say it's really an effort to make the user increasingly dependent upon the service that they become kind of addicted to it. Further, the complaint alleges that the networks have perpetuated harm on young users, citing research and reports about how the use of social media can be associated with various mental health issues like depression, anxiety, suicide, eating disorders, that kind of thing. Now, whether the court system will also find that these companies are responsible for perpetuating harm and hooking people into the system remains to be seen, because we're just at the very beginning of this process and I think be very hard to argue against it. I suspect that what we'll see as a settlement at some point, because you know, we've even seen internal documents from within Facebook slash Meta that essentially support at least some of these arguments, And you know, when your company's internal documents appear to support the allegations made against you, that becomes difficult to defend against. So we'll have to see. I mean, you never know. It all depends upon the court and how arguments are framed. So it's not like it's a done deal one way or the other yet. Next we're gonna talk about AI. In fact, we're gonna talk a lot about AI. I think stories about AI will be a huge thing throughout three. Chat gpt kind of got things fired up last November, and our first story about AI relates to the AI chat butt that has people creating machine generated children's book as teachers worried about students using it to cheat. You know, it goes from everything from interesting distraction to the downfall of society. And that of course is chat GPT. Reuter's reports that Microsoft is in talks with open Ai that's the group that owns and operates chat gpt, and that Microsoft plans to invest up to ten billion with a B dollars in open Ai. This deal would, reported lea see Microsoft ultimately take a forty nine steak in open ai, and other investors would take up the other and the final two percent. Because if you add nine. You do not get a hundred. I tried multiple times. I just couldn't get there. Now, the final two percent would belong to open aies nonprofit parent company. And one thing I did not realize but absolutely should have known. I mean maybe I knew it at one point and I just forgot. But it's that open Ai was originally founded by Sam Altman and Elon Musk. And once you hear that Elon Musk is involved in all that disruptive stuff that involves like arts and education, makes perfect sense because Elon Musk likes to stir uh poo poo, will say, I won't use the rude word for it, but yeah, Elon Musk is uh. I'm sure he thinks of it as being a disruptor, which I guess is, you know, putting a positive spin on it. But he wrecks shop by the way I put it. And yeah, and that includes creating things or funding things he doesn't. Musk is not an engineer, but he funds things that end up causing lots of headaches for established institutions and established ways of doing things. And frequently, not always, but frequently, the solution proposed by Musk is not superior to whatever was happening before it. So yeah, not a big surprise in the sense of like, oh, well that all fits. But yeah, I somehow missed that Elon musk Get co founded open Ai. Now that's not the only Microsoft AI story that I have today. Another deals with a program called vol E v A L L dash E. Now I can only assume that was meant as a reference to the Pixar film Wally, But voll E is an AI system that can synthesize voices like any voice. So all it takes is an audio sample of about three seconds of any voice. And not only that, Volley can synthesize speech that mimics the emotional tone and the acoustics that were present when the speaker created the sample. So if you had three seconds of someone totally losing their temper and say a tiled bathroom, the synthesized audio would likely sound livid and in a place that has a lot of hard services and echo to it. Or if someone were chipper and happy than they were in a well insulated space for sound, then it would come through the same way in the synthesized audio. So in theory, you could collect audio samples of someone in different emotional states, and then using text to speech and then switching to preserve the right tone. You could use this tool to produce like a moving monologue that the actual person has never said in their entire life. This is both fascinating and it's kind of scary. It's apparently not always convincing. I have not actually heard a lot of samples from this, so I haven't had a lot of personal experience with it. But from what I've read, at least in some cases you can tell, oh, this was machine generated, but in others there are some synthesized passages that are actually sound like they were read by the person who supply the original audio sample, and that you could not tell the difference. Now, Microsoft already recognizes how this kind of tool could cause serious problems, as Ours Technically reports researchers have written quote. Since vol E could synthesize speech that maintains speaker identity, it may carry potential risks in misuse of the model, such as spoofing voice identification or impersonating a specific speaker. To mitigate such risks, it is possible to build a detection model to discriminate whether an audio clip was synthesized by VOLI. We will also put Microsoft AI principles into practice when further developing the models. End quote. Also, Microsoft is not sharing this code that can help reduce the threat of someone using it to make it sound like. Let's say a famous person said things they never actually said. And when you consider the extent to which trolls on the Internet will go to hurt someone just for the lulls, this is a very good thing because I can only imagine them using a tool like this to make someone they don't like appear to say the absolutely worst stuff you can imagine. I'm talking like, truly vile things. That would be the first thing I would expect of this tool were to be publicly accessible, and by preserving emotional tone, it could even sound like the person was happy while they were saying the worst things you can imagine, which is a big old yuck. All Right, I've got a couple more stories I want to finish out with, but before we get to those, let's take another quick break. Hey, we're back, and we got a couple more AI stories before we move on to some other stuff. And these involve the organization do not pay. So this group does a lot of consumer advocacy kind of work. They got their start as a service that help people identify I and then cancel subscriptions to stuff that they rarely or never use. So you might create an account and then think, oh, hey, I haven't watched anything on this streaming platform and months why am I still paying for it? And then you want to bail and Do Not Pay would help you do that kind of thing. Well, something else the company has been experimenting with is using AI to help people when they have to appear in court, and apparently coming up next month, the organization is working with a defendant as they have to go to traffic court to defend themselves. The defendant is going to wear an ear piece and the AI will generate responses for the defendant to repeat while they're in court. Now, there are a few other details, but it's pretty scarce because Do not Pay wishes to preserve the defendants privacy, which makes total sense. We only know it's not going to take place in a traffic court in California, and Do not Pay has previously used AI to help people fight unfair parking tickets and found a sixty six US rate across a quarter of a million cases with that, so that usually involved AI writing generating a letter in an effort to fight a parking ticket, which is not a bad success rate six four percent. But this would be the first time that AI would actually be used in an in person court case to boost someone's defense UH strategies, and the law hasn't exactly been ahead of the game. When it comes to a I probably will not surprise you that there isn't any law against accepting AI powered assistance while appearing at trial, at least not yet, because no one ever thought that that was going to be a thing, or at least not a thing right now. So there's nothing preventing someone from doing this because no one's actually passed the law to prevent it. But then, traffic court is small potatoes because it's it's pretty low stakes. It's usually over a matter that involves some money, but it's not that much money, at least not in the grand scheme of things. It might be a lot for the person who has to pay a fine, but in the grand scheme it's never that huge, and frequently cases can end up being tossed out just because the officer who wrote the ticket fails to show up to court. If the officer doesn't show up, then the person charged as just gets to go. But on the flip side, Do Not Pay is perhaps cheekily seeking to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court of the United States. So the CEO of Do Not Pay tweeted, because of course this was in a tweet, that the company would pay a million dollars to any lawyer scheduled to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court, and this lawyer, in return for accepting the million dollars, would agree to wear some wireless ear buds like air pods and then follow the directions of the AI lawyer butt. The CEO says he's serious about this offwerare, but I don't think anyone's going to take him up on it, because while a million dollars is a lot of money, I don't think any lawyer wants to be the one who has their name associated with a potential publicity disaster. The things don't go well, then your name could forever be associated with this weird AI experiment. And I think most lawyers who are arguing in front of the Supreme Court wish to preserve their reputation to some degree. Plus there are rules about the kinds of stuff you can actually bring into the Supreme Court that includes there's a ban on electronic devices while the court is in session. So it's questionable about whether this would even be allowed in the first place, just on a basic level. So while the offer is sure to get some attention, I don't think there's any real chance of someone pouncing on it. But does illustrate how AI is going to continue to be a really big topic this year. All right, Switching away from AI across the pond in the UK, new legislation now requires builders to include gigabit Internet connections on any new home construction, which is a really cool thing. Any new home built in the UK has to have gigabit Internet connection is built into it. Uh. This of course doesn't mean that everyone will actually have access to gigabit Internet because you still have to have the service available in the area. You still have to pay for that service, but it will be possible. At least it won't be because your home lacks the connection. The connection will be built into the home. In addition, the legislation is going to make it easier for people in existing structures to get gigabit connections installed now. Easy does not mean cheap because the legislation is seeking for a cab a spending cap on how much it would cost to install connections into existing buildings. But that cap is high. It's like two thousand pounds. That's a lot of money, um, But the UK government estimates that around of installations would fall under such a cap anyway. So the cap is really there to prevent people who are living in out of the way places like rural areas where there's very little infrastructure. It's it's meant to prevent them from being victimized by having a h price tags they are just way too high to ever pay to have that connectivity built into them. So yeah, it's really expensive, but it's also meant to be a check on providers so that they can't bleed someone dry just because they happen to live out in the middle of nowhere. The legislation doesn't guarantee gigabit speed connectivity, uh, just the actual connections, which is there is a difference right the service and the actual hardware. So if there is no gigabit service in the region, then whatever is fastest will end up taking its place. The legislation also holds landlord's accountable too. If a renter wants to upgrade to gigabit connectivity within their apartment, they would contact a broadband provider, but because they don't own their their structure, like if they're living in an apartment or or a rented house or whatever, then the provider has to reach out to land words first to get permission, and nearly half of such requests went unanswered last year. But now if a landlord does not respond within thirty five days of receiving such a request from a broadband provider, the provider can take the matter to court to get access rights to the rented structure. By the way, reading up on what the broadband situation is like in the UK just reminded me how badly we have it here in the United States, where there is a distinct lack of competition among providers in most markets. Like the report I was reading, the person said there was like a hundred different providers they could choose from. That's not the case in the United States. Like, for instance, where I live, there is one provider who offers service that is more than two hundred megabits per second, So I'm not even in the gigabit per second area, and in the megabits per second, the next fastest is at thirty megabits per second. And that's the two major provide letters in this area, and all the other providers that are available in this area. Their services are built on top of the of the infrastructure provided by the first two choices. So there's no competition in the United States, and it's ridiculous that we continue to pretend like there is. Uh, that's me getting on my high horse about that and being irritated at how poorly this has been handled by regulatory agencies here in the United States. And I think it's ridiculous that I live in the city of Atlanta and I can't get access to gig a bit Internet. Um. And you should be upset too, because that affects the show. You know, this show, so it's it's affecting you too. It's not just me, alright, I'm done. Last year, one of the news stories that I covered was about how BMW was irritating people by locking certain car features behind subscription services, like heated car seats. So the upsetting thing is that these features typically are already present in the val right the vehicle can already do the thing that the subscription covers. It's just that the feature is switched off unless the owner pays a subscription to activate them. And a lot of people have the opinion that if a feature is in the vehicle, it should just be accessible upon purchase. I think that's our reasonable opinion. You could offer vehicles to have the feature as an option, and you can have other versions of the vehicle that do not have that option, and that can be reflected in the sticker price of the individual cars. But to have something built into a car that works but it's turned off by default, well that's frustrating for a lot of folks. And BMW is doubling down on that. Actually, it's more than doubling down on that. Here in the United States, BMW has five features that are locked behind subscription services. This is new in the US. They include Parking Assistant, Professional Traffic Camera, driving US Stance plus, drive recorder, and remote engine start. So, for example, if you wanted a one year subscription so that you could start your engine remotely, that would set you back a hundred five dollars For the year, you could pay two hundred fifty dollars at pre purchased three years of service, or if you wanted a lifetime subscription to Remote Engine Start for that specific BMW as long as you owned it, that would cost you three thirty dollars. Otherwise it's a ten bucks a month service. Personally, I look forward to the dystopian future where stuff like windshield wipers and turn signals are also subscription based, except of course, here in Atlanta, most folks would be well ahead of the curve on saving money because they don't know what turn signals are for anyway. Finally, we have a right to Repair update. I'll actually be doing an episode kind of as an update to write to repair in its current status here in the United States pretty soon. But one of the big holdouts on right to repair has recently made some concessions. That holdout is John Dear. It's a company that's best known as making farming equipment. They also make things like lawnmowers and that kind of stuff. Traditionally, John Deer lockdown its equipment so that farmers had no choice but to take their stuff to authorized John Deer service facilities, and that could sometimes be more expensive than an independent repair shop. Like if you've ever had a car, and you've looked at prices of taking that car to a dealership's service center versus going to an independent repair shop, you might see, oh, I could save a lot more money if I go to the independent place. Well, that same thing is true with other types of equipment as well, and John Deere tried very hard to make sure that people could not have an alternative. They used a few different approaches to discourage or outright prevent someone from going anywhere besides a John Dear licensed service facility. And this is because locking someone into an ecosystem of service and repairs creates an ongoing revenue stream. So you're not just selling someone a tractor, you're also essentially selling them all their maintenance and repair Moving forward, it might be in the form of securing licensing agreements with various service centers around the region. But yeah, this is a way to make more money rather than just rely on hardware sales. But on Sunday, the companies signed a memorandum of understanding with the American Farm Bureau Federation and now farmers and independent repair shops will be allowed to access stuff like repair manuals, tools and parts needed to perform specific kinds of repairs on specific kinds of equipment. But in return, the Bureau agreed that farmers and independent repair shops would maintain trade secrets, they would not divulge them, and they also promised not to override things like safety features and that kind of stuff. In other words, you can't soup up your actors so that it can travel the length of the field in like one tenth the normal time or anything like that, because that would be dangerous. But this is a pretty big win for the right to repair. Okay, that's the news I have for you for Tuesday, January twenty three. Will be back later this week with some more news, assuming that stuff happens, and I mean it keeps that keeps doing that, so I guess that's gonna be a thing. And if you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me. There are a couple of different ways you can do it. One is you can download the I Heart radio app. It's free to use. It's free to download. You just type tech stuff into the little search feature that will take you to the tech Stuff podcast page and you click on that and you'll see there's a little microphone icon in there. If you click on that, you can leave me a voice message up to thirty seconds in length, or if you prefer, you can send me your thoughts in Twitter form. The handle for the show is tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Yes. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.