Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and How the Tech Are Yet it is time for the tech News for Thursday, December fourteenth, twenty twenty three. And first up, before I actually get into the news, I really have to give a huge shout out to Ours Technica. I referenced them all the time, but for today's episode, I mean, article after article was popping up that really was relevant, and the quality of the work over at Ours Technica is taught notch. Once again, I don't have any connection with Ours Technica. I as far as I know, I don't know anyone who works there. I just really admire the work that they create. So a lot of the stuff today will be referencing that, as I will call out out in the story after story. Anyway, our first story actually is one of the ones that comes from Ours Technica. It was written by Ashley Bellinger and it's titled Elon Musk's x AD. Revenue reportedly fell one point five billion with a B this year amid boycotts, so the story elaborates on this, saying that initially analysts estimated that X, which was actually known as Twitter at the beginning of this year. That transformation actually happened this year. It seems like an eternity ago at this point, But anyway, that X would generate around three billion dollars in AD revenue. That was the initial estimate for twenty twenty three. Instead, that number is closer to two point five billion in AD revenue. Now, keep in mind ads are just one source of revenue for Twitter, but it's the main source. Anyway. Last year it was closer to four billion dollars in AD revenue. So yeah, the site has seen a massive drop, right four billion year to two point five billion this year. It's actually five billion the year before that. Now, this doesn't come as a huge surprise because there have been numerous brands, ranging from globally recognized names to smaller niche companies, that have ceased to advertise on the platform in the wake of various scandals. Those range from Elon Musk personally elevating anti Semitic conspiracy theories to Elon Musk deciding he would reinstate the account of Alex Jones while using the cover story of it was the will of the people in a poll that some might question the validity anyway. Musk has pretty much taken the you're killing my company stance against these advertisers, accusing them of running a semi organized campaign of destruction against X. He seems unwilling or maybe incapable of acknowledging that these are consequences that stem from his own actions, and instead thinks of it as some sort of conspiracy to destroy Twitter, just to argue that I don't see the logic in companies banding together to destroy Twitter. That makes no sense because prior to Musk's takeover of the company, Twitter was looked at as a viable advertising platform. I mean, it was far from perfect, don't get me wrong. Twitter was a mess before Musk took it over. But I don't know many brands that are actually eager to decrease the number of options they have when it comes to advertising. They would rather be able to advertise everywhere, like including inside your brain, if they could. Anyway, please check out the article in Ours Technica if you want more in depth analysis on the issue. I've got a lot more Musk related stories to get through for this episode. My apologies for that, but that's just how this week played out. So our next story comes from CBC's Jonathan Montpetite, who reports that several Canadian companies have also chosen to halt advertising on X. So Montpetit says that CBC investigated several accounts on X that were linked to extremists, including accounts that belonged to white nationalists, and when they were looking at the posts on these accounts, they also saw ads for prominent companies appearing in that feed, side by side with the hateful content. This actually mirrors what several other organizations have claimed to have found in the past, including the Center for Countering Digital Hate. That was one of the organizations that X threatened to sue after that nonprofit pointed out there was a rise of hateful content in general on X. That's something that advertisers would likely object to. So X has been fighting against these these these accusations or allegations, however you want to frame it. It's been fighting against these claims for the better part of the year. But organizations have found similar things, like they've discovered commonalities. So either all of these organizations are lying or at the very least manipulating data to support the narrative they want to tell, or things that X are pretty bad anyway, This story shows that X's issues with advertising extends beyond US borders. Now, on top of those issues, X continues to have sporadic technical problems. In an article titled an X outage Broke All Outgoing Links Again by Richard Lawler of The Verge yesterday afternoon, users on X found that clicking on any outgoing link in a post would only bring up an error message. Lawler reports that X appeared to resolve the issue after about an hour after it had happened, though according to Lawler, there was never any official acknowledgment from the company that the problem had even happened at all. Now, obviously, technical issues like that are also a concern for advertisers, right, it doesn't do you any good to post an ad on X if when someone who's actually interested in the ad clicks on a link and then they get an error page instead. That's no good either. As for why this problem happened in the first place, I would wager that the massive layoffs that musk oversaw at Twitter slash X means that it's much more difficult for staff to anticipate, prevent or even fix issues. But that's just my opinion. It's not something that I can point to as hard evidence. It just seems to be logical to me that when you lay off a massive amount of your engineering staff when problems crop up, it is a lot harder to address those in a timely manner. Still, it did resolve the issue in a little around an hour, which isn't terrible, I guess, especially when you consider the constraints that the team is working under. Those folks should receive huge accolades for getting the problem fixed at least within an hour. But you could also argue, well, this shouldn't have happened at all, and maybe it wouldn't have if Musk Hatton had that massive culling of staff earlier in the year. The woes don't stop for Musk yet. I don't think he's going to be counting twenty twenty three as one of the best years of his life as it's going right now, at least not the end of it. It's been a pretty rocky ride anyway. Druv Merotra and Dell Cameron of Wired and my apologies for butchering the name there. They have a piece that's titled Elon Musk's New Monkey Death Claims spur Fresh Demands for an SEC investigation. That's a wild headline, Elon Musk's New Monkey Death Claims. Elon Musk's New Monkey Death Claims to me, sounds like the name of a heavy metal band. But anyway, this is actually very serious and very sad. Business has to do with another of Musk's companies, the startup Neurolink. That's the company Musk founded that is dedicated to developing brain computer interfaces. That is a way for you to be able to interact and control computer systems using thought, and that's all you have to use. So the piece covers how an organization called the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine disputes Elon Musk's claims that the primates that have died as a result of Neurolink experimentation were already terminal cases. Musk said, you know, we've had to euthanize primates that we've experimented on, but these primates were already facing death. They were already in some form of terminal health. Perhaps they had cancer or some other condition that meant that they were dying, and that they specifically picked these animals because knowing that they were going to have to be euthanized afterward because they were already facing death. The advocacy group denies that they said that, you know, veterinary data points to the animals not having any sort of terminal cases before being put through the experimental procedures that then ultimately led to the animals being euthanized, and that instead what Musk was doing was just spouting off misinformation and lies in an effort to encourage investors to pour more money into the business. That he was misleading investors, and as such, they are calling upon the US Securities and Exchange Commission or SEC, to open an investigation into Neuralink. If you want to know more about this, you should definitely read the article over and wired, but I will warn you it is incredibly upsetting. If you are tenderhearted like I am, it may disturb you. I make no apologies for being a sap, by the way, That's just who I am, and I love animals. So it was a very hard read, but I think a very important one. We're not done with Elon Musk's companies just yet. We actually have a couple more stories, but before we get to that, for goodness sakes, let's just take a quick break to thank our sponsors. All right. I mentioned that we still had a couple of stories about Elon Musk companies. In this case, the company we're talking about is Tesla. So it's been an eventful week for Elon Musk. Tesla had to issue or we'll have to issue a recall for practically all Tesla's on US roads today. It's a software update kind of recall. This mas Tesla owners won't have to take their car into a dealership to have modifications performed on the vehicle or even swap out their vehicle or anything like that. They won't have to do that. But it has to do with Tesla's advanced driver assist features, namely autopilot. So essentially, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA, has ordered Tesla to increase the number of warnings sent to drivers to make sure that they keep their attention on the road even when they engage autopilot. The NHTSA determined that several Tesla owners were using autopilot features outside of their approved operating parameters, and this represents a danger to both the driver and to others on the road. Now, Tesla has always included language and its official documents that these features are meant for specific use cases like highway driving. Right, it's not meant for everything. And the drivers also are so posed to always remain focused on their surroundings. They're not supposed to just let the car take over. But then you also have folks like Elon Musk who complicate matters by hyping up the autonomous features of the technology, seemingly suggesting that they are more capable than what they really are. It's the same matter that's at the heart of an ongoing lawsuit between the State of California and Tesla. Anyway, once updated, Tesla's that are in autopilot mode will perform more frequent checks to ensure that the driver is still fully focused on what's going on and that their hands remain on the steering wheel. Otherwise, the vehicle may disengage autopilot and force the driver to take over. And according to Reuter's, Tesla faces more opposition in Sweden. This stems from the company's refusal to negotiate with collective bargaining groups that represent various workers like mechanics, for example. I mentioned this in an earlier Technic New episode. But in Sweden it is customary for these worker groups essentially unions, to negotiate their own salaries and benefits with each employer. There's no national minimum wage or anything like that, so all agreements are made between the worker organizations and the employers. But Tesla hasn't played ball, and so multiple worker groups have now refused to cooperate with Tesla to apply pressure to the company. The latest of these is the Transport Workers Union, which now says it will stop collecting waste from Tesla's workshops starting December twenty fourth unless Tesla meets with these groups. Honestly, the whole situation between Tesla and the various Swedish worker groups is starting to sound like an Always Sunny and Philadelphia episode to me. And I know that Elon Musk traditionally has been very anti workers' unions, so it doesn't surprise me that it has reached this particular level now. In non Elon News, You're Welcome, a lawsuit claims that insurance company Humana has been relying upon an AI model to make decisions about agreeing to or denying care to patients mostly the latter, and that this AI model has a failure rate of around ninety percent. Yikes, So the whole story is in ours tetnaca. Once again, big shout out to them. This one is by Beth Mole and it's titled Humana also using AI tool with ninety percent error rate to deny care, lawsuit claims. So the also in that headline refers to a similar accusation against insurance company United Health, which also makes use of this same AI model. That AI model is a product titled NH Predict. It is named after the company that makes it, nave Health. The ninety percent error rate references that allegedly, when people have appealed a denial of care decision that was guided by this AI model, ninety percent of the time those decisions are reversed. So essentially, the AI model takes into account various factors to determine when benefits should end for specific medical issues. The lawsuit argues that the model is far too restrictive and it's limited and it cannot take into consideration particulars that are unique to each individual patient, so as a result, patients find their benefits cut off prematurely or denied outright, and that insurance companies are making use of this AI tool not because it is accurate, but actually for the opposite reason that it is incredibly inaccurate, but it's inaccurate and airing on the side where insurance companies aren't having to pay out as much so they can hoard all that money for themselves. There's a lot I could say about the insurance industry, but I won't because that this isn't the Pott cast for it. But the lawsuit accuses Humana of breach of contract along with several other offenses, and we'll have to see where this goes from here. I just will remind you there are lots of legitimate beneficial uses for artificial intelligence. There really are. They're ones that could have incredible positive impact on our lives. But there are other applications of AI that are unbalanced in how they will benefit one party versus everybody else, in this case, the insurance industry versus anyone who's not an insurance company or an investor in an insurance company. So we do need to wrestle with that. Next up, well, guess what, I've got another piece from ours Tetnica once again by Ashley Bellinger. Seriously, Ashley, where do you find the time to do all this stuff? Your articles are great? I just can't imagine. Gosh, you got to work super hard anyway. The article is titled trains were designed to break down after a third party repairs hackers find and yeah, this is another piece that demonstrates how companies can jealously guard their ecosystems. Right. We have the whole right to repair movement here in the United States that aims to break down those walls that companies will put up, like the John Deere tractor company. There's all these cases where farmers were arguing they should have the right to be able to maintain and repair their own equipment and not have to go to a specific authorized John Deere repair shop in order to get this stuff done. This falls into that same sort of category, but in this case it's about trains in Poland. So a hacker group called Dragon Sector investigated trains made by a Polish company called Nuog. So Dragon Sector was actually hired to do this to look into it because there was a railway company that was using these trains for NWOG and they were seeing a lot of breakdowns and were wondering what was actually at the heart of it, because it didn't appear to be hardware related. It seemed to be software related, and they wondered if something hinky was going on, so they hired these hackers to look into it. The hackers say they found the reason that apparently the software running on these trains would detect if the trains were brought anywhere other than an official Nuog facility for repairs. So if a railway company dared to use some third party repair shop in order to perform maintenance or repair on ANWOG train, the software would detect that and then trigger failures, so essentially bricking the train, which is kind of like how some smartphones would brick themselves if the phones detected that users were trying to, you know, jail break them. Newog has denied the hackers claims and threatened a lawsuit against them, but the hackers maintained that their investigation has plenty of proof that Nwogg's was fixing the game in their favor. Newogg has also suggested that perhaps a competitor actually hacked into Nuogg's trains and altered the software to make it look like nwog was walling off its ecosystem, But in fact, this is all an elaborate attempt to discredit Nuog and to really heap dirt upon their name. That sounds like a hail Mary kind of play if you ask me. I'm not saying that it would be impossible, but it doesn't sound like the most likely reason why this software would include these kinds of features, assuming that the hackers are telling the truth. They also said they uncovered essentially a code that you could enter into the system that would clear all the issues. So if that's true, then it's what they're saying is, yeah, nuogg sabotages their trains so that you're forced to use Nuog to fix them. Then they just put in this code and everything's fixed because they were the ones who put the problem there in the first place. That's the allegation. Very interesting case here, all right, I've got a couple more stories to go through before we can get to that. Let's take another quick break. We're back. CNBC's Chelsea Cox has a piece titled FCC votes to ban termination fees for cable and satellite services, and that's something that I think should make a lot of American customers happy because previously, if you were a customer of a cable or a satellite provider and you wanted out of your agreement and it was you know, maybe you had entered into a two year agreement and a year and a half in you wanted out, typically to get out you had to pay a fee, and sometimes it was a prohibitively hefty fee for the privilege of ending this agreement. Personally, in my opinion, I have always thought of these fees as a way of discouraging even the meager amount of competition we see in this space here in the United States. I've said it many times. Most Americans actually have very few options when it comes to stuff like cable providers. In my neighborhood, I have two options. That's only if I don't want internet service as part of that package, right, If I want internet service as part of my cable package, really I only have one choice. The other one is so far behind that it's not really a viable choice in the first place. But one way to discourage competition is to lock customers into a multi year agreement, and then in order to make sure they stay there, you tack on this hefty fee to prevent anyone from severing that agreement early. Unsurprisingly, the FCC passed this measure right down party lines. Two members of the FCC voted against it, which is pretty typical. Like, I don't think I can't remember the last time I saw a matter where the FCC unanimously voted on a measure. It almost always comes down to party lines. Now, before I get to some article recommendations, I do have one final story. This one comes from NASA. Miles Hatfield posted a blog entry and it's titled Engineers are working to resolve issues with Voyager one computer. So the Voyager one spacecraft has traveled further into space than any other spacecraft we've ever sent up there. It's in fact, it's no longer in our Solar System. It is traveling through interstellar space, and a computer glitch in Voyager one's Flight data System or FDS appears to be the cause of this problem. It can actually receive and execute commands that we send here from Earth, so that part is still good, but it's unable to send information back to us, so we can't get any scientific or engineering data back from Voyager one. We can just send stuff to it, which which greatly limits its utility as a scientific instrument. Obviously, now engineers are hoping that they can resolve this problem, but it's likely going to take weeks in order to come up with a solution to do it, so it may be a while before we can find out if we can get Voyager to send information back to us again. And in fact, just sending a message between Earth and the spacecraft takes nearly a full day. In fact, it takes twenty two and a half hours to go from Earth to the Voyager one, and that's because of how far away the spacecraft is from US. Here's hoping NASA can implement a fix, as the story of the Voyager spacecraft has been a truly remarkable one. I've got a couple of suggested reading recommendations for y'all. One of those, No Surprise, comes from Ours Technica. This one was written by John Brodkin and it is titled Ted Cruz wants to stop the FCC from updating data breach notification rules. So yeah, it's another tech meets political news item, and it highlights what seems like an odd position from my perspective, because I would think that requiring companies to be prompt about reporting data breaches was an important component of keeping businesses, customers, investors, pretty much everybody safer. But it gets more complicated than that. The other recommendation is actually a series of articles in The Verge and they're all posted under an umbrella topic titled the Year Twitter Died. So The Verge has done an amazing job of analyzing how Twitter slash x has navigated the year twenty twenty three and makes the case that Twitter is actually dead, if only because the service now has the name X if nothing else. I won't lie. It is a lot to read. There are a lot of articles in this, but it's all very well done and it gives a pretty thorough treatment of the various issues the company has faced this year. All right, that's it for the news today. I hope you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and How the Tech Are Yet it is time for the tech News for Thursday, December fourteenth, twenty twenty three. And first up, before I actually get into the news, I really have to give a huge shout out to Ours Technica. I referenced them all the time, but for today's episode, I mean, article after article was popping up that really was relevant, and the quality of the work over at Ours Technica is taught notch. Once again, I don't have any connection with Ours Technica. I as far as I know, I don't know anyone who works there. I just really admire the work that they create. So a lot of the stuff today will be referencing that, as I will call out out in the story after story. Anyway, our first story actually is one of the ones that comes from Ours Technica. It was written by Ashley Bellinger and it's titled Elon Musk's x AD. Revenue reportedly fell one point five billion with a B this year amid boycotts, so the story elaborates on this, saying that initially analysts estimated that X, which was actually known as Twitter at the beginning of this year. That transformation actually happened this year. It seems like an eternity ago at this point, But anyway, that X would generate around three billion dollars in AD revenue. That was the initial estimate for twenty twenty three. Instead, that number is closer to two point five billion in AD revenue. Now, keep in mind ads are just one source of revenue for Twitter, but it's the main source. Anyway. Last year it was closer to four billion dollars in AD revenue. So yeah, the site has seen a massive drop, right four billion year to two point five billion this year. It's actually five billion the year before that. Now, this doesn't come as a huge surprise because there have been numerous brands, ranging from globally recognized names to smaller niche companies, that have ceased to advertise on the platform in the wake of various scandals. Those range from Elon Musk personally elevating anti Semitic conspiracy theories to Elon Musk deciding he would reinstate the account of Alex Jones while using the cover story of it was the will of the people in a poll that some might question the validity anyway. Musk has pretty much taken the you're killing my company stance against these advertisers, accusing them of running a semi organized campaign of destruction against X. He seems unwilling or maybe incapable of acknowledging that these are consequences that stem from his own actions, and instead thinks of it as some sort of conspiracy to destroy Twitter, just to argue that I don't see the logic in companies banding together to destroy Twitter. That makes no sense because prior to Musk's takeover of the company, Twitter was looked at as a viable advertising platform. I mean, it was far from perfect, don't get me wrong. Twitter was a mess before Musk took it over. But I don't know many brands that are actually eager to decrease the number of options they have when it comes to advertising. They would rather be able to advertise everywhere, like including inside your brain, if they could. Anyway, please check out the article in Ours Technica if you want more in depth analysis on the issue. I've got a lot more Musk related stories to get through for this episode. My apologies for that, but that's just how this week played out. So our next story comes from CBC's Jonathan Montpetite, who reports that several Canadian companies have also chosen to halt advertising on X. So Montpetit says that CBC investigated several accounts on X that were linked to extremists, including accounts that belonged to white nationalists, and when they were looking at the posts on these accounts, they also saw ads for prominent companies appearing in that feed, side by side with the hateful content. This actually mirrors what several other organizations have claimed to have found in the past, including the Center for Countering Digital Hate. That was one of the organizations that X threatened to sue after that nonprofit pointed out there was a rise of hateful content in general on X. That's something that advertisers would likely object to. So X has been fighting against these these these accusations or allegations, however you want to frame it. It's been fighting against these claims for the better part of the year. But organizations have found similar things, like they've discovered commonalities. So either all of these organizations are lying or at the very least manipulating data to support the narrative they want to tell, or things that X are pretty bad anyway, This story shows that X's issues with advertising extends beyond US borders. Now, on top of those issues, X continues to have sporadic technical problems. In an article titled an X outage Broke All Outgoing Links Again by Richard Lawler of The Verge yesterday afternoon, users on X found that clicking on any outgoing link in a post would only bring up an error message. Lawler reports that X appeared to resolve the issue after about an hour after it had happened, though according to Lawler, there was never any official acknowledgment from the company that the problem had even happened at all. Now, obviously, technical issues like that are also a concern for advertisers, right, it doesn't do you any good to post an ad on X if when someone who's actually interested in the ad clicks on a link and then they get an error page instead. That's no good either. As for why this problem happened in the first place, I would wager that the massive layoffs that musk oversaw at Twitter slash X means that it's much more difficult for staff to anticipate, prevent or even fix issues. But that's just my opinion. It's not something that I can point to as hard evidence. It just seems to be logical to me that when you lay off a massive amount of your engineering staff when problems crop up, it is a lot harder to address those in a timely manner. Still, it did resolve the issue in a little around an hour, which isn't terrible, I guess, especially when you consider the constraints that the team is working under. Those folks should receive huge accolades for getting the problem fixed at least within an hour. But you could also argue, well, this shouldn't have happened at all, and maybe it wouldn't have if Musk Hatton had that massive culling of staff earlier in the year. The woes don't stop for Musk yet. I don't think he's going to be counting twenty twenty three as one of the best years of his life as it's going right now, at least not the end of it. It's been a pretty rocky ride anyway. Druv Merotra and Dell Cameron of Wired and my apologies for butchering the name there. They have a piece that's titled Elon Musk's New Monkey Death Claims spur Fresh Demands for an SEC investigation. That's a wild headline, Elon Musk's New Monkey Death Claims. Elon Musk's New Monkey Death Claims to me, sounds like the name of a heavy metal band. But anyway, this is actually very serious and very sad. Business has to do with another of Musk's companies, the startup Neurolink. That's the company Musk founded that is dedicated to developing brain computer interfaces. That is a way for you to be able to interact and control computer systems using thought, and that's all you have to use. So the piece covers how an organization called the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine disputes Elon Musk's claims that the primates that have died as a result of Neurolink experimentation were already terminal cases. Musk said, you know, we've had to euthanize primates that we've experimented on, but these primates were already facing death. They were already in some form of terminal health. Perhaps they had cancer or some other condition that meant that they were dying, and that they specifically picked these animals because knowing that they were going to have to be euthanized afterward because they were already facing death. The advocacy group denies that they said that, you know, veterinary data points to the animals not having any sort of terminal cases before being put through the experimental procedures that then ultimately led to the animals being euthanized, and that instead what Musk was doing was just spouting off misinformation and lies in an effort to encourage investors to pour more money into the business. That he was misleading investors, and as such, they are calling upon the US Securities and Exchange Commission or SEC, to open an investigation into Neuralink. If you want to know more about this, you should definitely read the article over and wired, but I will warn you it is incredibly upsetting. If you are tenderhearted like I am, it may disturb you. I make no apologies for being a sap, by the way, That's just who I am, and I love animals. So it was a very hard read, but I think a very important one. We're not done with Elon Musk's companies just yet. We actually have a couple more stories, but before we get to that, for goodness sakes, let's just take a quick break to thank our sponsors. All right. I mentioned that we still had a couple of stories about Elon Musk companies. In this case, the company we're talking about is Tesla. So it's been an eventful week for Elon Musk. Tesla had to issue or we'll have to issue a recall for practically all Tesla's on US roads today. It's a software update kind of recall. This mas Tesla owners won't have to take their car into a dealership to have modifications performed on the vehicle or even swap out their vehicle or anything like that. They won't have to do that. But it has to do with Tesla's advanced driver assist features, namely autopilot. So essentially, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA, has ordered Tesla to increase the number of warnings sent to drivers to make sure that they keep their attention on the road even when they engage autopilot. The NHTSA determined that several Tesla owners were using autopilot features outside of their approved operating parameters, and this represents a danger to both the driver and to others on the road. Now, Tesla has always included language and its official documents that these features are meant for specific use cases like highway driving. Right, it's not meant for everything. And the drivers also are so posed to always remain focused on their surroundings. They're not supposed to just let the car take over. But then you also have folks like Elon Musk who complicate matters by hyping up the autonomous features of the technology, seemingly suggesting that they are more capable than what they really are. It's the same matter that's at the heart of an ongoing lawsuit between the State of California and Tesla. Anyway, once updated, Tesla's that are in autopilot mode will perform more frequent checks to ensure that the driver is still fully focused on what's going on and that their hands remain on the steering wheel. Otherwise, the vehicle may disengage autopilot and force the driver to take over. And according to Reuter's, Tesla faces more opposition in Sweden. This stems from the company's refusal to negotiate with collective bargaining groups that represent various workers like mechanics, for example. I mentioned this in an earlier Technic New episode. But in Sweden it is customary for these worker groups essentially unions, to negotiate their own salaries and benefits with each employer. There's no national minimum wage or anything like that, so all agreements are made between the worker organizations and the employers. But Tesla hasn't played ball, and so multiple worker groups have now refused to cooperate with Tesla to apply pressure to the company. The latest of these is the Transport Workers Union, which now says it will stop collecting waste from Tesla's workshops starting December twenty fourth unless Tesla meets with these groups. Honestly, the whole situation between Tesla and the various Swedish worker groups is starting to sound like an Always Sunny and Philadelphia episode to me. And I know that Elon Musk traditionally has been very anti workers' unions, so it doesn't surprise me that it has reached this particular level now. In non Elon News, You're Welcome, a lawsuit claims that insurance company Humana has been relying upon an AI model to make decisions about agreeing to or denying care to patients mostly the latter, and that this AI model has a failure rate of around ninety percent. Yikes, So the whole story is in ours tetnaca. Once again, big shout out to them. This one is by Beth Mole and it's titled Humana also using AI tool with ninety percent error rate to deny care, lawsuit claims. So the also in that headline refers to a similar accusation against insurance company United Health, which also makes use of this same AI model. That AI model is a product titled NH Predict. It is named after the company that makes it, nave Health. The ninety percent error rate references that allegedly, when people have appealed a denial of care decision that was guided by this AI model, ninety percent of the time those decisions are reversed. So essentially, the AI model takes into account various factors to determine when benefits should end for specific medical issues. The lawsuit argues that the model is far too restrictive and it's limited and it cannot take into consideration particulars that are unique to each individual patient, so as a result, patients find their benefits cut off prematurely or denied outright, and that insurance companies are making use of this AI tool not because it is accurate, but actually for the opposite reason that it is incredibly inaccurate, but it's inaccurate and airing on the side where insurance companies aren't having to pay out as much so they can hoard all that money for themselves. There's a lot I could say about the insurance industry, but I won't because that this isn't the Pott cast for it. But the lawsuit accuses Humana of breach of contract along with several other offenses, and we'll have to see where this goes from here. I just will remind you there are lots of legitimate beneficial uses for artificial intelligence. There really are. They're ones that could have incredible positive impact on our lives. But there are other applications of AI that are unbalanced in how they will benefit one party versus everybody else, in this case, the insurance industry versus anyone who's not an insurance company or an investor in an insurance company. So we do need to wrestle with that. Next up, well, guess what, I've got another piece from ours Tetnica once again by Ashley Bellinger. Seriously, Ashley, where do you find the time to do all this stuff? Your articles are great? I just can't imagine. Gosh, you got to work super hard anyway. The article is titled trains were designed to break down after a third party repairs hackers find and yeah, this is another piece that demonstrates how companies can jealously guard their ecosystems. Right. We have the whole right to repair movement here in the United States that aims to break down those walls that companies will put up, like the John Deere tractor company. There's all these cases where farmers were arguing they should have the right to be able to maintain and repair their own equipment and not have to go to a specific authorized John Deere repair shop in order to get this stuff done. This falls into that same sort of category, but in this case it's about trains in Poland. So a hacker group called Dragon Sector investigated trains made by a Polish company called Nuog. So Dragon Sector was actually hired to do this to look into it because there was a railway company that was using these trains for NWOG and they were seeing a lot of breakdowns and were wondering what was actually at the heart of it, because it didn't appear to be hardware related. It seemed to be software related, and they wondered if something hinky was going on, so they hired these hackers to look into it. The hackers say they found the reason that apparently the software running on these trains would detect if the trains were brought anywhere other than an official Nuog facility for repairs. So if a railway company dared to use some third party repair shop in order to perform maintenance or repair on ANWOG train, the software would detect that and then trigger failures, so essentially bricking the train, which is kind of like how some smartphones would brick themselves if the phones detected that users were trying to, you know, jail break them. Newog has denied the hackers claims and threatened a lawsuit against them, but the hackers maintained that their investigation has plenty of proof that Nwogg's was fixing the game in their favor. Newogg has also suggested that perhaps a competitor actually hacked into Nuogg's trains and altered the software to make it look like nwog was walling off its ecosystem, But in fact, this is all an elaborate attempt to discredit Nuog and to really heap dirt upon their name. That sounds like a hail Mary kind of play if you ask me. I'm not saying that it would be impossible, but it doesn't sound like the most likely reason why this software would include these kinds of features, assuming that the hackers are telling the truth. They also said they uncovered essentially a code that you could enter into the system that would clear all the issues. So if that's true, then it's what they're saying is, yeah, nuogg sabotages their trains so that you're forced to use Nuog to fix them. Then they just put in this code and everything's fixed because they were the ones who put the problem there in the first place. That's the allegation. Very interesting case here, all right, I've got a couple more stories to go through before we can get to that. Let's take another quick break. We're back. CNBC's Chelsea Cox has a piece titled FCC votes to ban termination fees for cable and satellite services, and that's something that I think should make a lot of American customers happy because previously, if you were a customer of a cable or a satellite provider and you wanted out of your agreement and it was you know, maybe you had entered into a two year agreement and a year and a half in you wanted out, typically to get out you had to pay a fee, and sometimes it was a prohibitively hefty fee for the privilege of ending this agreement. Personally, in my opinion, I have always thought of these fees as a way of discouraging even the meager amount of competition we see in this space here in the United States. I've said it many times. Most Americans actually have very few options when it comes to stuff like cable providers. In my neighborhood, I have two options. That's only if I don't want internet service as part of that package, right, If I want internet service as part of my cable package, really I only have one choice. The other one is so far behind that it's not really a viable choice in the first place. But one way to discourage competition is to lock customers into a multi year agreement, and then in order to make sure they stay there, you tack on this hefty fee to prevent anyone from severing that agreement early. Unsurprisingly, the FCC passed this measure right down party lines. Two members of the FCC voted against it, which is pretty typical. Like, I don't think I can't remember the last time I saw a matter where the FCC unanimously voted on a measure. It almost always comes down to party lines. Now, before I get to some article recommendations, I do have one final story. This one comes from NASA. Miles Hatfield posted a blog entry and it's titled Engineers are working to resolve issues with Voyager one computer. So the Voyager one spacecraft has traveled further into space than any other spacecraft we've ever sent up there. It's in fact, it's no longer in our Solar System. It is traveling through interstellar space, and a computer glitch in Voyager one's Flight data System or FDS appears to be the cause of this problem. It can actually receive and execute commands that we send here from Earth, so that part is still good, but it's unable to send information back to us, so we can't get any scientific or engineering data back from Voyager one. We can just send stuff to it, which which greatly limits its utility as a scientific instrument. Obviously, now engineers are hoping that they can resolve this problem, but it's likely going to take weeks in order to come up with a solution to do it, so it may be a while before we can find out if we can get Voyager to send information back to us again. And in fact, just sending a message between Earth and the spacecraft takes nearly a full day. In fact, it takes twenty two and a half hours to go from Earth to the Voyager one, and that's because of how far away the spacecraft is from US. Here's hoping NASA can implement a fix, as the story of the Voyager spacecraft has been a truly remarkable one. I've got a couple of suggested reading recommendations for y'all. One of those, No Surprise, comes from Ours Technica. This one was written by John Brodkin and it is titled Ted Cruz wants to stop the FCC from updating data breach notification rules. So yeah, it's another tech meets political news item, and it highlights what seems like an odd position from my perspective, because I would think that requiring companies to be prompt about reporting data breaches was an important component of keeping businesses, customers, investors, pretty much everybody safer. But it gets more complicated than that. The other recommendation is actually a series of articles in The Verge and they're all posted under an umbrella topic titled the Year Twitter Died. So The Verge has done an amazing job of analyzing how Twitter slash x has navigated the year twenty twenty three and makes the case that Twitter is actually dead, if only because the service now has the name X if nothing else. I won't lie. It is a lot to read. There are a lot of articles in this, but it's all very well done and it gives a pretty thorough treatment of the various issues the company has faced this year. All right, that's it for the news today. I hope you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.