Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. He there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Johnan Strickland. I'm an executive producer for I Heart Radio. And how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for Thursday, July seven, two thousand twenty two. And while the biggest news today is about a world leader resigning, that's not directly related to text. So we'll just have to settle on some runners up and this will be a fairly quick episode, I think. Now. Our first story is about a man named Brennan Lawson who has sued his former employer, which happens to be Meta, you know, Facebook. Lawslin was part of Facebook's escalations team. For those who are not in the know, and I count myself among them because I learned about this today. The escalations team is part of Facebook's content moderation strategy. UH. The escalation team typically handles higher profile content moderation instances, such as when someone in a government position flags content on Facebook, so it's kind of the fast lane for content review and moderation. Anyway, Lawson claims that while he was working in that department, he saw that Facebook employees could retrieve information that users had deleted, such as messages that were sent between different users on Facebook Messenger. That actually contradicts Facebook's claims that once a user deletes content off the platform, Facebook subsequently wipes that content off its own servers. Lawson said that there were cases in which law enforcement would demand access to user information during investigations, for example, and that Facebook employees would regularly retrieve information, including the deleted stuff, and then review it before deciding what to pass on to law enforcement. Lawson objected to this practice, saying that Facebook was, you know, being disingenuous, is being dishonest with its users. Lawson claims he was subsequently fired in a retaliatory action, one that Facebook masked by saying that it was actually because Lawson had mishandled a situation in which he attempted to help his grandmother, who said her account had been hacked. According to Business Insider, Facebook said Lawson failed to fill out a field in an online form with his grandmother's email address. Now, I didn't realize that was such a terrible mistake that it would warrant termination anyway. If Lawson's claims are true, then I expect we'll see a lot more pressure applied to Facebook. Presumably this capability to look at deleted material wouldn't work if you were to enable end to end encryption in your Facebook messenger app, assuming that it really is true end to end encryption, because if it is is, then no other parties besides the ones actually in the conversation should be able to see the contents of that conversation. So I guess this is really me saying that if you want your private messages to remain private, you should switch to end to end encryption, because that's not on by default. We've got a couple of stories about law enforcement agencies and intelligence operations issuing warnings about hackers, and first up, it's all about China. The US FBI and the u k m I five issued a joint statement warning the world about Chinese hackers and the country's increased online activity. The warning largely focused on two different kinds of threats. One involves attempts to interfere in political and democratic processes in various countries. The two agencies indicated that Chinese hackers had been actively attempting to disrupt elections in various countries, really in an effort to shape global politics. Uh, most lee in a way that benefits China, which is pretty you know, that's that's pretty obvious. I guess The other big branch involves technological espionage, namely that Chinese hackers are attempting to steal technology and information, and that China poses as a huge threat to Western businesses. In fact, FBI Director Christopher Ray said that China's hacking department is quote bigger than that of every other major country combined end quote. Representatives from China were quick to dismiss the claims, saying that they are untrue and it's an example of Western countries demonizing China. The FBI also issued another warning about hackers, this time regarding North Korean state sponsored hacking groups. This warning was about ransomware attacks. North Korean hackers have been targeting various healthcare institutions with these attacks, attempting to lock down computer network systems while demanding ransoms to return operations to the healthcare entities. Obviously, any disruption of a healthcare company's system is a crisis, which is why hackers target these organizations in the first place. It's very difficult to tell a hospital to be patient and to not pay off a ransom when patients lives could potentially hang in the balance. The FBI stresses that paying a ransom is never a good idea. For one thing, there's never a guarantee that the hackers will actually return access to the locked off systems, so you could pay and still be locked out. But another reason is because every ransom that is paid ends up justifying the attack. If the attacks end up being profitable, then there's going to be more attacks. If targets refuse to pay ransoms, the attacks don't pay off, and you know, the thought goes the hackers will turn to something else rather than spending their time and effort doing something that nets them no financial gain. As for why North Korea sponsoring these attacks, the hypothesis is that it's all in an effort to secure more funds to pay for weapons such as nuclear weapons, as various sanctions around the world have otherwise placed tight restrictions on North Korea. One hacking story that we've talked about several times on Tech Stuff involves Apple devices. You might remember the Israeli company n s O Group famous for creating a product called Pegasus. Pegasus is essentially an attack that can compromise an iOS device like an iPhone simply by sending this attack over I message. The target wouldn't even have to open the message for that attack to work, at least previously, so their phone would just become a surveillance device that was really under the control of the person who committed the attack. While Apple would subsequently patch out that particular vulnerability, The experience prompted the company to create a new feature called lockdown Mode. Now, lockdown mode is meant for high profile iPhone users, people like politicians, journalists, political activists, that kind of thing, the type of people who would frequently become the targets of this type of attack, because you know, NSL group sells this this tool to various country governments, many of which are, let's say they lean heavily authoritarian. And while the claim is that this tool is meant to help fight things like terrorism, the reality is this tool has been used to attack lots of different people, many of whom are not terrorists, but do pose a threat to authoritarian regimes. So lockdown mode turns off many of the iPhones features in an effort to reduce the pathways that a hacker could take to compromise an iOS device. So one such feature would be the preview function and eye message. You know this, this function that would have activated an attack like Pegasus. However, there are also a ton of other features that lockdown mode disables, including ones that most users would probably want to retain access to. Like, you probably don't want to put your phone in lockdown mode if you're just a typical user. And again, Apple intends lockdown mode for those users who are more likely to be targeted by these kinds of attacks, you know, like state sponsored attacks. Most of us don't warrant that kind of attention. Uh. The mode goes into a beta test this week, and from what I understand, it will be available to all iPhone users later this year. So while you might not have a need for this feature, it should be available to you if you would want to enable it. Just know that if you do enable it, you'll be eliminating a whole bunch of the selling points that Apple leans on when it's promoting the iPhone. Then again, if you are a high profile user, that tradeoff might not be such a bad deal. It's been a hot minute since I've mentioned Elon Musk in one of these episodes, and really it's just gonna be a tangential thing here because this is more about how employees who are leaving Tesla are getting scooped up in other big tech companies. So Musk tweeted a few weeks ago that they were going to be cutbacks at Tesla. Then he kind of went back and forth about what that actually meant. And he also demanded that employees put in a full forty hour work week at the office before even thinking about working remotely, which you know, some folks interpreted as an attempt to encourage employees to resign rather than have to go through layoffs. Well, a report from Punks and pen Stripes, which describes itself as a quote private network of transformation executives end quote, has tracked some four fifty former Tesla employees as they moved on and updated their linked in profiles to indicate where they had gone to. So, according to those changes on LinkedIn, ninety former Tesla employees found work with rival electric vehicle companies Rivian and Lucid Motors. Eight former Tesla employees listed their new employer as one of the more traditional auto manufacturing companies. That is, you know, a company that might make electric vehicles, but it's not exclusively in that business, so companies like Ford or General Motors. Other former Tesla folks moved to companies like Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon, some of them going to an Amazon backed company called zooks zo o X, which is an autonomous vehicle company. A few ten in fact kept it in the family then moved on over to SpaceX, a different elhon must company. And this report is kind of interesting because a lot of news pieces have talked about how companies in the tech sector have largely initiated hiring free is uh and and these changes make it sound like it's not quite at that level. There are companies that have put in hiring freezes, but it's not industry wide. A lot of companies have been cutting back on hiring, but they haven't eliminated it entirely. So just to kind of mitigate some of the fear, uncertainty and doubt out there. Not to say that things are hunky dory and all rosy, but they're not. They're also not as dire as some reports tend to make it out to be. Now, there are plenty of signs of concern that economic factors are going to remain let's say, challenging for the near future, so we should keep that in mind as well. We'll have some more stories, but first let's take a quick break. Before the break, we were talking electric vehicles, and speaking of e vs, Consumer Reports released a survey result that indicated that twenty eight percent of Americans who are surveyed say they would not buy an electric vehicle. And you might wonder, well, what's the reason why did they say that? And there are actually several different reasons that people cited. One is the concern about driving range. You know, how far you can go on a single charge in an electric vehicle. There's this continuing fear of becoming stranded, like on a highway because your car ran out of juice. That fear really isn't an issue for most people under normal driving situations. Electric vehicles have ranges well beyond what most commutes involved. So like the average commute in the United States is between thirty and forty miles round trip, and electric vehicles typically have a driving range of more than two hundred miles, like two hundred thirty miles. A couple of years ago, it was actually higher, it was like two fifty miles on a single charge. So assuming you were recharging your v hicle at home every day, you'd be fine to go to and from work, plus run all your errands and not have to worry about running out of battery. Road trips would be a different story, of course. But another big concern that people cited was the lack of charging stations. That there's not the infrastructure to support electric vehicles. And it is true that there are not nearly as many electric vehicle recharging stations, and they're not nearly as accessible as gas stations are, like those outnumber electric vehicle charging stations by a huge factor. But another reason that people said they wouldn't buy any v was because of the cost of electric vehicles. And they are pretty darn expensive. And that's even within the context of how all cars are pretty darn expensive right now. Consumer Reports indicates that a lack of education about electric vehicles is one of the reasons for this significant response. I mean, we're talking about more than a quarter of all those who were surveyed here. It appears that many of those survey didn't know about various economic incentives that can offset the price of electric vehicles, nor did they understand the driving range capability of these vehicles, So it could be that more education would mean future surveys would show very different results. More education is definitely needed if we want to see more states push for moving off of internal combustion engine vehicles in favor of electric vehicles. Uh. If we don't have education and people are acting on a misunderstanding of the capabilities of e vs, then they're more likely to you know, vote against it, which when you're talking about finding ways to reduce climate impact. Uh, we need every single step to go in the right direction, and any delay is just gonna make matters worse. The Competition and Markets Authority or c m A in the UK is investigating Amazon to see if the company is unfairly rigging the game on its platform. And I almost didn't include this story because I'm certain it's one we've talked about before, but apparently this is a more recent investigation. So at issue here is how Amazon promotes Amazon owned brands to consumers, and the argument is that Amazon will display its own brands ahead of competitors, which pushes customers to buy more Amazon products, and those might not be the best version of you know, whatever the product is, or it might not be the least expensive or whatever, so customers could be sent to purchase a quote unquote bad deal, and that Amazon is profiting over its competitors because it's not giving the competitors a fair shake for customers to even see the products. And we've seen this sort of case pop up several times, like including in the EU and here in America, and not just targeting Amazon, although that is a frequent target of this particular criticism. Lots of companies have been accused of promoting their own products on their own platforms and then subsequently kind of burying the competition in the process. If we were to use an analogy, imagine that you go to a grocery store and all the store branded products are in prominent locations on shelves. They're organized, they're shiny, they're lovely, and then all the name brand stuff, which is not owned by the store is hidden off in corners or high up on shelves where they're hard to reach, or maybe on the bottom shelf where it's hard to see. That's kind of what the c m A is looking into with Amazon. Company reps say that Amazon will work with the c m A during this investigation and that the company has quote always worked hard to help small businesses selling on Amazon to succeed, which is both in their and our best interests end quote. I suppose the investigation will determine if that claim is in fact accurate. Finally, research firm Ampere Analysis predicts that we're gonna see a dip in video game sales this year, to the tune of a one decline. Now, to put that in perspective, we should acknowledge that the video game sector had some pretty impressive growth over the last two years. From the industry saw a growth of and ultimately grew to a hundred billion dollar industry. This little dip would mean that by the end of this year, we're looking more at a one eight billion dollar industry that's still bookoos of buckos. Right. As for an explanation of these changes, well, there are a couple right. The first, and perhaps most obviously, the pandemic created a bit of a boom for video games sales, even as we saw numerous titles experienced production delays due to COVID. Now we've got more folks going out and abountain fewer of them are staying home all day every day. Plus you know, the concern over economic recession has a lot of people easing off on their purchases, and then there are the continuing issues around supply. It still hard to find the most recent consoles on the market. It's still hard to find like the top end video game cards, which are slowly becoming less scarce and less expensive, but they're still not widely available, nor are they backed down to m s r P levels. So you could think of this dip as a type of market adjustment and not some sort of omen that the video game sector is in trouble as a whole. Though. You know, some companies like Activision Blizzard are still in the hot seat for multiple reasons, but that's another story. That's it for today's news on tech Stuff. If you have suggestions for future topics, please reach out to me. You can do that in a couple of ways. One way is just on Twitter. Our handle is tech stuff hs W. The other way is to download the I Heart radio app and navigate over to the tech Stuff podcast page. There's a little microphone icon on that page you can click on that leave a voice message up to thirty seconds in length if you would like us to use that in a future episode. You can let us know within that message, because I'm all about opt in, not opt out, and yeah, that's that's a couple of different ways to get in touch with me. As for all of you, I hope you're all well. I am slowly getting back to where I was pre COVID, so I keep hoping that the next time I record, I'll be back to pre COVID levels of Jonathan. Not quite there yet, but getting there, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Y Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my 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, Johnan Strickland. I'm an executive producer for I Heart Radio. And how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for Thursday, July seven, two thousand twenty two. And while the biggest news today is about a world leader resigning, that's not directly related to text. So we'll just have to settle on some runners up and this will be a fairly quick episode, I think. Now. Our first story is about a man named Brennan Lawson who has sued his former employer, which happens to be Meta, you know, Facebook. Lawslin was part of Facebook's escalations team. For those who are not in the know, and I count myself among them because I learned about this today. The escalations team is part of Facebook's content moderation strategy. UH. The escalation team typically handles higher profile content moderation instances, such as when someone in a government position flags content on Facebook, so it's kind of the fast lane for content review and moderation. Anyway, Lawson claims that while he was working in that department, he saw that Facebook employees could retrieve information that users had deleted, such as messages that were sent between different users on Facebook Messenger. That actually contradicts Facebook's claims that once a user deletes content off the platform, Facebook subsequently wipes that content off its own servers. Lawson said that there were cases in which law enforcement would demand access to user information during investigations, for example, and that Facebook employees would regularly retrieve information, including the deleted stuff, and then review it before deciding what to pass on to law enforcement. Lawson objected to this practice, saying that Facebook was, you know, being disingenuous, is being dishonest with its users. Lawson claims he was subsequently fired in a retaliatory action, one that Facebook masked by saying that it was actually because Lawson had mishandled a situation in which he attempted to help his grandmother, who said her account had been hacked. According to Business Insider, Facebook said Lawson failed to fill out a field in an online form with his grandmother's email address. Now, I didn't realize that was such a terrible mistake that it would warrant termination anyway. If Lawson's claims are true, then I expect we'll see a lot more pressure applied to Facebook. Presumably this capability to look at deleted material wouldn't work if you were to enable end to end encryption in your Facebook messenger app, assuming that it really is true end to end encryption, because if it is is, then no other parties besides the ones actually in the conversation should be able to see the contents of that conversation. So I guess this is really me saying that if you want your private messages to remain private, you should switch to end to end encryption, because that's not on by default. We've got a couple of stories about law enforcement agencies and intelligence operations issuing warnings about hackers, and first up, it's all about China. The US FBI and the u k m I five issued a joint statement warning the world about Chinese hackers and the country's increased online activity. The warning largely focused on two different kinds of threats. One involves attempts to interfere in political and democratic processes in various countries. The two agencies indicated that Chinese hackers had been actively attempting to disrupt elections in various countries, really in an effort to shape global politics. Uh, most lee in a way that benefits China, which is pretty you know, that's that's pretty obvious. I guess The other big branch involves technological espionage, namely that Chinese hackers are attempting to steal technology and information, and that China poses as a huge threat to Western businesses. In fact, FBI Director Christopher Ray said that China's hacking department is quote bigger than that of every other major country combined end quote. Representatives from China were quick to dismiss the claims, saying that they are untrue and it's an example of Western countries demonizing China. The FBI also issued another warning about hackers, this time regarding North Korean state sponsored hacking groups. This warning was about ransomware attacks. North Korean hackers have been targeting various healthcare institutions with these attacks, attempting to lock down computer network systems while demanding ransoms to return operations to the healthcare entities. Obviously, any disruption of a healthcare company's system is a crisis, which is why hackers target these organizations in the first place. It's very difficult to tell a hospital to be patient and to not pay off a ransom when patients lives could potentially hang in the balance. The FBI stresses that paying a ransom is never a good idea. For one thing, there's never a guarantee that the hackers will actually return access to the locked off systems, so you could pay and still be locked out. But another reason is because every ransom that is paid ends up justifying the attack. If the attacks end up being profitable, then there's going to be more attacks. If targets refuse to pay ransoms, the attacks don't pay off, and you know, the thought goes the hackers will turn to something else rather than spending their time and effort doing something that nets them no financial gain. As for why North Korea sponsoring these attacks, the hypothesis is that it's all in an effort to secure more funds to pay for weapons such as nuclear weapons, as various sanctions around the world have otherwise placed tight restrictions on North Korea. One hacking story that we've talked about several times on Tech Stuff involves Apple devices. You might remember the Israeli company n s O Group famous for creating a product called Pegasus. Pegasus is essentially an attack that can compromise an iOS device like an iPhone simply by sending this attack over I message. The target wouldn't even have to open the message for that attack to work, at least previously, so their phone would just become a surveillance device that was really under the control of the person who committed the attack. While Apple would subsequently patch out that particular vulnerability, The experience prompted the company to create a new feature called lockdown Mode. Now, lockdown mode is meant for high profile iPhone users, people like politicians, journalists, political activists, that kind of thing, the type of people who would frequently become the targets of this type of attack, because you know, NSL group sells this this tool to various country governments, many of which are, let's say they lean heavily authoritarian. And while the claim is that this tool is meant to help fight things like terrorism, the reality is this tool has been used to attack lots of different people, many of whom are not terrorists, but do pose a threat to authoritarian regimes. So lockdown mode turns off many of the iPhones features in an effort to reduce the pathways that a hacker could take to compromise an iOS device. So one such feature would be the preview function and eye message. You know this, this function that would have activated an attack like Pegasus. However, there are also a ton of other features that lockdown mode disables, including ones that most users would probably want to retain access to. Like, you probably don't want to put your phone in lockdown mode if you're just a typical user. And again, Apple intends lockdown mode for those users who are more likely to be targeted by these kinds of attacks, you know, like state sponsored attacks. Most of us don't warrant that kind of attention. Uh. The mode goes into a beta test this week, and from what I understand, it will be available to all iPhone users later this year. So while you might not have a need for this feature, it should be available to you if you would want to enable it. Just know that if you do enable it, you'll be eliminating a whole bunch of the selling points that Apple leans on when it's promoting the iPhone. Then again, if you are a high profile user, that tradeoff might not be such a bad deal. It's been a hot minute since I've mentioned Elon Musk in one of these episodes, and really it's just gonna be a tangential thing here because this is more about how employees who are leaving Tesla are getting scooped up in other big tech companies. So Musk tweeted a few weeks ago that they were going to be cutbacks at Tesla. Then he kind of went back and forth about what that actually meant. And he also demanded that employees put in a full forty hour work week at the office before even thinking about working remotely, which you know, some folks interpreted as an attempt to encourage employees to resign rather than have to go through layoffs. Well, a report from Punks and pen Stripes, which describes itself as a quote private network of transformation executives end quote, has tracked some four fifty former Tesla employees as they moved on and updated their linked in profiles to indicate where they had gone to. So, according to those changes on LinkedIn, ninety former Tesla employees found work with rival electric vehicle companies Rivian and Lucid Motors. Eight former Tesla employees listed their new employer as one of the more traditional auto manufacturing companies. That is, you know, a company that might make electric vehicles, but it's not exclusively in that business, so companies like Ford or General Motors. Other former Tesla folks moved to companies like Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon, some of them going to an Amazon backed company called zooks zo o X, which is an autonomous vehicle company. A few ten in fact kept it in the family then moved on over to SpaceX, a different elhon must company. And this report is kind of interesting because a lot of news pieces have talked about how companies in the tech sector have largely initiated hiring free is uh and and these changes make it sound like it's not quite at that level. There are companies that have put in hiring freezes, but it's not industry wide. A lot of companies have been cutting back on hiring, but they haven't eliminated it entirely. So just to kind of mitigate some of the fear, uncertainty and doubt out there. Not to say that things are hunky dory and all rosy, but they're not. They're also not as dire as some reports tend to make it out to be. Now, there are plenty of signs of concern that economic factors are going to remain let's say, challenging for the near future, so we should keep that in mind as well. We'll have some more stories, but first let's take a quick break. Before the break, we were talking electric vehicles, and speaking of e vs, Consumer Reports released a survey result that indicated that twenty eight percent of Americans who are surveyed say they would not buy an electric vehicle. And you might wonder, well, what's the reason why did they say that? And there are actually several different reasons that people cited. One is the concern about driving range. You know, how far you can go on a single charge in an electric vehicle. There's this continuing fear of becoming stranded, like on a highway because your car ran out of juice. That fear really isn't an issue for most people under normal driving situations. Electric vehicles have ranges well beyond what most commutes involved. So like the average commute in the United States is between thirty and forty miles round trip, and electric vehicles typically have a driving range of more than two hundred miles, like two hundred thirty miles. A couple of years ago, it was actually higher, it was like two fifty miles on a single charge. So assuming you were recharging your v hicle at home every day, you'd be fine to go to and from work, plus run all your errands and not have to worry about running out of battery. Road trips would be a different story, of course. But another big concern that people cited was the lack of charging stations. That there's not the infrastructure to support electric vehicles. And it is true that there are not nearly as many electric vehicle recharging stations, and they're not nearly as accessible as gas stations are, like those outnumber electric vehicle charging stations by a huge factor. But another reason that people said they wouldn't buy any v was because of the cost of electric vehicles. And they are pretty darn expensive. And that's even within the context of how all cars are pretty darn expensive right now. Consumer Reports indicates that a lack of education about electric vehicles is one of the reasons for this significant response. I mean, we're talking about more than a quarter of all those who were surveyed here. It appears that many of those survey didn't know about various economic incentives that can offset the price of electric vehicles, nor did they understand the driving range capability of these vehicles, So it could be that more education would mean future surveys would show very different results. More education is definitely needed if we want to see more states push for moving off of internal combustion engine vehicles in favor of electric vehicles. Uh. If we don't have education and people are acting on a misunderstanding of the capabilities of e vs, then they're more likely to you know, vote against it, which when you're talking about finding ways to reduce climate impact. Uh, we need every single step to go in the right direction, and any delay is just gonna make matters worse. The Competition and Markets Authority or c m A in the UK is investigating Amazon to see if the company is unfairly rigging the game on its platform. And I almost didn't include this story because I'm certain it's one we've talked about before, but apparently this is a more recent investigation. So at issue here is how Amazon promotes Amazon owned brands to consumers, and the argument is that Amazon will display its own brands ahead of competitors, which pushes customers to buy more Amazon products, and those might not be the best version of you know, whatever the product is, or it might not be the least expensive or whatever, so customers could be sent to purchase a quote unquote bad deal, and that Amazon is profiting over its competitors because it's not giving the competitors a fair shake for customers to even see the products. And we've seen this sort of case pop up several times, like including in the EU and here in America, and not just targeting Amazon, although that is a frequent target of this particular criticism. Lots of companies have been accused of promoting their own products on their own platforms and then subsequently kind of burying the competition in the process. If we were to use an analogy, imagine that you go to a grocery store and all the store branded products are in prominent locations on shelves. They're organized, they're shiny, they're lovely, and then all the name brand stuff, which is not owned by the store is hidden off in corners or high up on shelves where they're hard to reach, or maybe on the bottom shelf where it's hard to see. That's kind of what the c m A is looking into with Amazon. Company reps say that Amazon will work with the c m A during this investigation and that the company has quote always worked hard to help small businesses selling on Amazon to succeed, which is both in their and our best interests end quote. I suppose the investigation will determine if that claim is in fact accurate. Finally, research firm Ampere Analysis predicts that we're gonna see a dip in video game sales this year, to the tune of a one decline. Now, to put that in perspective, we should acknowledge that the video game sector had some pretty impressive growth over the last two years. From the industry saw a growth of and ultimately grew to a hundred billion dollar industry. This little dip would mean that by the end of this year, we're looking more at a one eight billion dollar industry that's still bookoos of buckos. Right. As for an explanation of these changes, well, there are a couple right. The first, and perhaps most obviously, the pandemic created a bit of a boom for video games sales, even as we saw numerous titles experienced production delays due to COVID. Now we've got more folks going out and abountain fewer of them are staying home all day every day. Plus you know, the concern over economic recession has a lot of people easing off on their purchases, and then there are the continuing issues around supply. It still hard to find the most recent consoles on the market. It's still hard to find like the top end video game cards, which are slowly becoming less scarce and less expensive, but they're still not widely available, nor are they backed down to m s r P levels. So you could think of this dip as a type of market adjustment and not some sort of omen that the video game sector is in trouble as a whole. Though. You know, some companies like Activision Blizzard are still in the hot seat for multiple reasons, but that's another story. That's it for today's news on tech Stuff. If you have suggestions for future topics, please reach out to me. You can do that in a couple of ways. One way is just on Twitter. Our handle is tech stuff hs W. The other way is to download the I Heart radio app and navigate over to the tech Stuff podcast page. There's a little microphone icon on that page you can click on that leave a voice message up to thirty seconds in length if you would like us to use that in a future episode. You can let us know within that message, because I'm all about opt in, not opt out, and yeah, that's that's a couple of different ways to get in touch with me. As for all of you, I hope you're all well. I am slowly getting back to where I was pre COVID, so I keep hoping that the next time I record, I'll be back to pre COVID levels of Jonathan. Not quite there yet, but getting there, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Y Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.