Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jothan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and how the Tech Area. It is time for the tech News for Thursday, January six, twenty twenty two, and we're gonna focus a lot on c E S in this episode. So we're gonna look with a at a roundup of some of the interesting things, uh that I learned about at C E S two. Full disclosure, I didn't go to c E S. I mostly was following the reporting of others and you know, kind of looking at all the different stuff that companies were promoting. But I did not attend. I thought that it was irresponsible for me to go, not projecting that on anyone else. Everyone has their reasons about going or not going, so I'm not trying to apply that to everyone. I just felt it was the wrong decision for me. But in Tuesday's episode, I mentioned Samsung's remote control that can harvest energy from WiFi signals. Very similar to a lot of other wireless charging technologies, but this one is really cool because you don't have to set it down on like a special pad or anything. It's it's just harvesting energy from WiFi signals on its own. That to me is super cool. And I also I think I talked about smart kitty litter box that connects to stuff like Amazon's Alexa, which sounds silly on the surface of it, but I actually think it's kind of a cool idea. However, obviously there's a lot more we could talk about, so I figured I would go through some of the things I came across and I thought were interesting and talk about those. Now, keep in mind, this is the tippy tippy top of the iceberg that is c E s. You could just follow the announcements from one company and spend a week talking about it. So this is by no means the best of the best or anything like that. It's just the stuff I found interesting. And we are going to go in a particular order. It's called alphabetical, So we'll start off with the Amica robot. Amaca has spelled a M E c A. A video of Amica was posted on Twitter back in and it went viral. You might have seen it. It had a very expressive robot in it. Ce S was the first time I'm aware of where a larger audience was able to see Amica in the robotic flesh. I guess Amaca comes out of a company called Engineered Arts and they build a robot as quote, the world's most advanced human shaped robot representing the forefront of human robotics technology end quote. The big deal with Amica is that it has a very flexible and really expressive face with like eyebrow ridges and lots of points of movement around the eyes and the mouth, so it can give very human expressions. So Amica can make these really compelling facial expressions, and Engineered Arts calls it a development platform. So in other words, this is kind of a starting point or a stepping stone, which could be one of the paths that lead us to robots interacting with us within human spaces. But the folks that Engineered Arts are very quick to point out that that future is still a pretty good ways off. Amaca is a great example of using robotics to mimic human expression, but a lot of other pieces have to fall into place before you've got a robot capable of navigating through human spaces safely. For example, having a robot that can natively understand what expressions to pair with different kinds of data. That starts to get pretty complicated. Like if you were to incorporate, say a smart speaker in a robot like Amica, and you were asking it to give you news, and maybe the news is pretty dark and disturbing. You don't want Amca looking all cheery and happy while delivering that, right, that would be a disconnect. These are things that are you know, going to take time for us to really suss out. But in the nearer term, a robot like Amica could be used as like a point of information. For example, like you could go perhaps into an office building and behind a desk, you might see a robot that looks like Amica that's able to give you directions, answer basic questions about the building and the tenants in the building, perhaps um and to be able to create expressions that are human like. Now, that kind of robot would be stationary. That drastically simplifies the requirements needed for the use case. Right, they don't have to throw what doesn't have to get up and walk around? Uh, Because you know, the more the robot needs to do in order to fulfill whatever the job is, the more complicated. The design has to be. However, when you look at videos of robots from say Boston Dynamics, it only takes a little imagination to combine those capabilities with the really expressive amica and to think, yeah, you know what, it is, the robots world, and we're all just living in it. One of the neatest computer designs I saw coming out of c S two was the a sus zen Book seventeen fold. Now, as the name suggests, this is a seventeen technically seventeen point three inch foldable computer. So when folded like a laptop, so that you have you know, an upper half and then the desktop half. The top screen measures twelve and a half inches, and the bottom half can act as a virtual keyboard. You can have an on screen keyboard there. You could also pair it with a Bluetooth keyboard and either operated like your standard laptop with the Bluetooth keyboard position on top of the lower folded portion, or you can unfold the screen and use a little backstop, turn it on side and it serves as a desktop monitor. So this is another hybrid device that can perform like a tablet, a laptop, or a desktop PC. It can also serve as a multi screen display all on one screen. Now, I am notoriously negative about touch screen interfaces for computers, but if I were to go for one, this is probably what I would gravitate toward. I find it pretty interesting, it's versatile, and I gotta admit it's also kind of pretty. Uh. The o led screen is a big part of it being pretty. It's also a big part of how it can be foldable in the first place. Asus says the launch should be sometime mid year. Uh they hepefully said the year in question would be two, so sometime in the middle of this year, but there is no price information as of yet. Get ready to hear that particular phrase on repeat throughout a lot of these stories. One thing that I have started doing more since the pandemic started is to spend time at this quiet little how that that I occasionally occupy well outside of Atlanta, and I just look out at nature. The place I go to has got a lot of birds around it, and I've gotten kind of into bird watching. I just recently got a pair of inexpensive binoculars to kind of dip my toe in that. And that's why I feel I have to talk about the bird Buddy smart bird feeder, and yeah, it's a bird feeder with smart technology, which I know it sounds ridiculous. It sounds just as crazy as a smart kitty litter box, But like the kitty litter box, this thing has convinced me that I want one. See. It's a bird feeder that has an incorporated battery powered camera inside it, and the camera can take images and video of the birds that visit your feeder and send them to a connected app that's on your smartphone. And it's that connected app that I really love because not only do you get to see the little birdies as they come to visit your bird feeder, you go alert saying hey, there's a bird there. The app will actually identify the types of birds visiting your feeder and we'll give you a little bit of information on them. So it takes a picture and then identifies the bird based on the picture and tells you, oh, well, this is the bird. You know, the kind of range that it lives in, the kind of foods it likes. And it's kind of like a gamification system in the app. You can you know, collect virtual cards of the birds that visit you and you can try and catch them all, except, of course you're not catching birds, you're feeding them. The app also contains hints on how to attract more birds to the feeder. Uh. And this was an extremely successful Kickstarter project before they went to c S. Kind of reminds me of Pebble in that regard, r I p Pebble And Uh. They're now taking pre orders for bird feeders, which are, as you might have guessed, pretty expensive that we're talking two dollars for one, and that's technically a fift discount off the what is projected to be the final sales price when it does launch. The shipping is scheduled for June of twenty twenty two. And yeah, I ordered one. I know, I know it's crazy in a way to spend two hundred bucks on a bird feeder, But at the same time, I'm like, it's pretty neat. Uh. And I like the idea a lot, and I kind of want to support this company to see what else they come up with, because I love the idea of being able to observe nature without disturbing it. That's really my go to on this. But yeah, I don't know. I got a little swept up in it. Well, if you were to visit c E S you would know or you would soon find out that the North hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center is where you see most of the car stuff. One car innovation shown off during c e S was BMW's i X flow e ink tech. Alright, So e ink is the technology that's in a lot of your basic e book gadgets, like think of your old, old, old school kindles before they became tablets. So it uses a pretty simple principle in which you have els under the screen and they're filled with electrically charged pigments, typically white and black pigments, and you manipulate them with electric fields that either you know, that move them to either the surface of the display so that they're right up against the back of the screen, or they're moved back behind it where you can't see it. So let's say you've got negatively charged black pigments and positively charged white pigments. Well, opposite charges attract, so you could use a positive electric field to pull all the black pigment to the top of the cell and you've get yourself a black image on the screen. Well, e INK displays consists of tons of these cells, each filled with these electrically charged pigments. The i X flow body tech with BMW takes this concept and applies it to cars, So you can have a BMW that has a body that can actually change color on demand. The model on display at c e S could go from white to black and black to white, and could e in display changing patterns. So you've got a paint job that you can change whenever you like. You can even have it essentially be animated as you're driving. So this isn't just flashy though. It is that it can also be practical when you want to do stuff like reflect light or absorb more light depending upon weather conditions. BMW also says it's working on a color version of the tech for future vehicles. I have no idea how well this will hold up to wear and tear, and I imagine if you're in a traffic accident, it could be a little more expensive to repair than your typical body and paint job, but it's still pretty neat. We've got some more ce S stories to talk about and a couple of other things, but first let's take a quick break. Okay, we're back now. If you've dipped your toe into home automation. You know that it can get a little bit frustrating if you're not all in on a single ecosystem. Um the devices and systems typically work pretty well within their own system, but they don't always play well with each other if you mix and match. In fact, sometimes they can't communicate with each other at all, and that gets very frustrating when you're trying to you know, kit out your automated home. We've seen some movement to try and address this issue. Google, Amazon, Samsung, and Apple formed a group called MATTER that will launch later this year. The naimes to standardized technologies across home automation devices. But to confuse matters a little bit, we also now have the Home Connectivity Alliance or h c A. Samsung, by the way, also joined the h c A as well as MATTER. Maybe Samsung can be the liaison between the two standards alliance groups anyway. Other members of the h c A include g E, Train, Residential, and electro Lux. So we might slowly be moving toward the world where consumers can just freely choose which components from which companies they want to integrate into their automated home set up without having to worry if they're all compatible. It's no fun if you've got like a dozen different hubs connected to your Internet system and you have to use like three different types of smart speakers to interact with them, and remember which one controls the lights versus the air conditioning and all that kind of stuff. People just want their stuff to work, right, That's that's all we want. We just want our stuff to work, and we want to be able to pick which devices go where. So I think that's a good move. Now, those of it, y'all who who know what I look like, you might be surprised to hear my next ce S takeaway, which is the Loureal Color Sonic. This is device used to dye your hair from home without dealing with unpredictable results and all the mess that home dying jobs typically encounter. At least that's the sales pitch for the device. Now, the device looks a bit like an elect tronic brush. Uh. They have bristles that oscillate, and in between the bristles there are little nozzles. The device also has a space where you insert a cartridge of hair dye. Then they're gonna have something like forty different colors when they actually launched this thing, which will be in twenty three. The device pushes the hair dye through those nozzles that are interspersed with the bristles, and the nozzles zigzag while the bristles oscillate, and you just brush it through your hair, so you you know, it's like you're doing just a once over through each section of your hair with this thing, and then you wait about half an hour, then you rense it out and voila, says Loreal, you have a reliable, consistent home hair dye job. This device is not scheduled to launch until twenty three, like I said, and I do not know how much it will cost, nor how much the cartridges will cost. I do know that they say that for most hair dye jobs, a single cartridge will be sufficient to do the full job. And for a lot of people, you might not even use up all the dye that's in a single cartridge, and you can just hold on to that and use it for a future application so that you're not having die go to waste. Uh. Seems pretty simple, at least as simple as brushing your hair, which I admit I have not done in about twenty three years, so it's possible that it's trickier than I remember. But whatever, Okay, y'all, I live in Georgia, and even without the issues of climate change, we rarely see significance amounts of snow. You're talking like maybe an inch or inch and a half. Possibly we see more ice than snow, which is way worse. But yeah, we don't get a less snow here. And since the weather this week the first week of January was hovering around seventy degrees fahrenheit, I suspect it might be a while before I get another big snowfall in my life. But for y'all who do see snow, maybe you would be interested in the Moonbike's snowbike. So yeah, it's an electric bike for the snow kind of like a paired down snowmobile. The handlebars steer a ski that's in the front, and the whole thing is propelled with a battery powered snow tread that's in the back half of the snowbike. I wouldn't be surprised to see something like this in a James Bond film, only I don't know that it lives up to Bonds, you know, very demanding specifications It's two thirds the size of a normal snowmobile, and according to Moonbike's CEO, the bike can hold up to two batteries. You can mount two different batteries in it, and each battery provides up to one and a half hour's worth of writing time. Again, that's according to the CEO. I saw other people suggest that it might be closer to like forty five minutes, which is a significant smaller amount of time, like half the time. But I don't know. I haven't actually tested these. But unlike a lot of other stuff at c e S, this is a product that's actually launched right now. You can order one here in the United States and expect delivery before the end of January. Now, if you're wondering how much it costs, well, it'll set you back at minimum around bucks. That's eight thousand, five hundred dollars. That's without adding a second battery or other options. It also doesn't include taxes, so you will be actually paying more than that. But hey, if you got around you know, like ten grand to burn, and you've got a ton of snow to tool around in, maybe this could be your new toy. I think it sounds pretty neat, but it's obviously meant for you know, someone else, like not me. And our next two items are all about virtual reality, and you know, VR has had a real slow burn as far as mass adoption goes. Part of that might be because traditionally VR headsets are bulky and uncomfortable to wear. In fact, the first time I ever wore a VR headset, it was supported by cables from the ceiling in order to take some of the weight off of the user, because otherwise it would just been too heavy. Plus I think I was like twelve at the time. It probably would have crushed me. I was, I was a wee up of a lad. But Panasonic is introducing a lightweight headset called the Megan X VR glasses. Megan X is really hard for me to say. It looks like Megan the name Megan followed by X. So if your ex's name Megan, maybe it'll be easy for you. Anyway. These glasses weigh in at about half a pound or just over eight ounces. The glasses look kind of like those sunglasses you see that have the shields around them that blackout light from the sides. I always think of Judge Doom from who framed Roger Rabbit or David Tennant's Crowley from Good Omens, the television adaptation. Anyway, these obviously do not have transparent lenses because it's a VR headset, it's not an augmented reality headset. And there are speakers embedded in the frames of the glasses. I don't know if it's bone conduction or if it's just regular speakers. Um. And the frames actually do fold, so the the ears pieces do fold down like a classic pair of glasses do. And the display in these things is no joke. It's able to project five point two K resolution video with high dynamic range a K a h d R, which you know, provides those really vibrant, lifelike colors. And there's some stuff we don't know yet, like we don't know when it's going to be launched, we don't know how much it are gonna cost. We don't know whether or not they're going to be wireless or if you're going to be tethered to a PC in order to use them. Obviously, that's another big barrier to adoption for VR. Most people aren't too keen on having to be connected to a device. It limits your movement, so that's you know, the price, the weight, and tethering I think are three big barriers to mass adoption, but um, you know, this one looks pretty cool. I'm still not sold on VR becoming mainstream just yet, but this could be a look into a future that maybe could see more widespread adoption, at least among the those of you out there who could afford it. I don't count myself among those, by the way. And the other big VR story out of c e S is the PlayStation VR two and the VR two Sense controllers. Uh. This system is designed specifically for the PS five, which I'm told exists, but you know, it's still really hard to find one. The headset provides four K video with HDR and a one degree field of view. The display is an O LED display, and Sony says that the frame rate should be between ninety two one hurts. Frame rate is how many frames are presented to you per second. Generally speaking, you want a lot of frames to give a nice smooth experience. You want around at least sixty hurts typically for like the high end gamers, so hurts is good. It's also got eye tracking technology built into it, so not only can the headset track the way you turn your head, you can also detect what your eyes are looking at. That could potentially be useful for future game developers if they can find ways to incorporate eye tracking features that are a natural fit for the game. Obviously, just throwing it in there to throw it in there that never works out. We've seen it fail with stuff like the connect. But if you can find a way to incorporate it in a way that is fun and makes sense, maybe includes like accessibility features for people who otherwise would have trouble playing these things, I think that's great. The Sense controllers have haptic feedback. I always just think of that as a good old rumble pack and adaptive triggers, so in other words, the tension on the triggers can change. So Sony said, imagine that you're drawing an arrow in a bow. You might actually feel the resistance and the trigger to represent the resistance you would feel as you start to draw the bowstring back. Sony will be releasing a Horizon game for this system called Horizon Call of the Mountain, and it will be a VR showcase for this particular system. It was actually developed for VR from the beginning, so it's not a game that's been adapted for VR, but is this often the case with gadgets at c e S. We have no release date or price for it yet. I expect we'll hear a lot more of it later in the year. Sony typically holds one or two big events virtual events at least throughout the year, so I'm sure we'll hear more about it then. All right, we have a couple more stories to go before we get to that. Let's take another quick break. So it sounds like the metaverse was all over CEES this year. Actually followed a Twitter thread that was documenting different examples of booths that incorporated the phrase or the term metaverse in them, sometimes with no real obvious connection to anything that you might think of as a metaverse, but it is definitely out there in terms of marketing and buzz. As for anything practical, that's a totally different matter. But some stuff that frequently gets lumped in with the metaverse did get shown off at c S, namely n F T S. Samsung is the culprit here and they showed off their two thousand, twenty two connected TVs that will support art n F T S. N F T S, by the way, that's non fungible tokens if somehow you have avoided the term up to this point. And n f T I can really represent anything digital. It doesn't have to be like a digital piece of art that you look at. It could be anything digital. And it's kind of like a certificate of ownership. Like if you've ever seen those commercials where you can own a star and you get a certificate that says you're the owner of the star. I would argue that n f T s are pretty much the same thing as that. So what does this mean practically? That is hard to say because digital goods, being digital, are really easy to copy and distribute. So you have ownership of something that you don't actually have. You don't have control over it, you have ownership of it. It's it's a weird thing. It's also you know, it's not like a one of a kind physical work of art, right where there's only one of them that exists. All the rest are copies or prints or whatever, but only one true one exists and it can inhabit a physical space. The tokens just represent ownership. But Samsung TVs will let you display the n f T art that you own in your home, so you can show off those eight cartoons to all your guests as they walk through your classy high rise penthouse apartment. That's just the way I imagine enough T people living. Uh. And then you get to explain to your guests why you paid tens of thousands of dollars for eight cartoons. More on that later in this episode. Also, apparently you'll be able to purchase and sell n f T art through Samsung's televisions. And can you tell that I hate this already? For the record, I don't mind thinking of n f T s as a way to support an artist, at least not, you know, on the surface of it. But then after artists sells in n f T, I don't think you're supporting the artist anymore like that. That's that one point of sale, right the artist sells an n f T representing something they've created, they make money off of it. You have supported the artists. But then let's say you turn around and you sell the n f T you bought for, say twenty bucks, and you sell it to someone else for a hundred bucks, and then that person turns around they sell it to someone else for a thousand bucks. And this keeps on going until the bottom falls out. Well, the original artist only sees that first twenty bucks, right, It's not like they're getting kickbacks of all these other sales, and so you're not really supporting the artist. I would argue, it's really more of a speculation engine that just keeps going until it falls apart. At least that's how I see it. And maybe I'm one of the blind who isn't releasing the promise of n f T s. That's how they come across to me anyway. Uh, Samsung is letting you show that n f T art on your television and we'll let you look at the metadata and everything. Yeah. Uh. The other reason I'm not super crazy about n f t s is they're built on top of the Ethereum blockchain, and at least as of now, Ethereum is still on a proof of work model of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency mining, which means it plays into the conspicuous consumption of electricity and thus is a contributor to stuff like carbon emissions and climate change. Not really crazy about any of that anyway. Yeah, Samsung TVs are r l in on that. Something else Samsung did was they finally got into the o LED game. See Samsung TVs for a while have been based on l e ED technology, and they have created their own tech called q LEAD that stands for Quantum Dot l e ED displays. But this year Samsung showed off TV screens and computer monitors using oh LAD technology while incorporating the quantum dot technology with it. With an oh LAD screen, every single pixel, that is, every single point of light you see on the screen is its own back light, so you can you can illuminate an individual pixel and not illuminate anything else. So oh LAD screens are able to show off scenes that have really dark colors like true black, in a better way than traditional l e D screens can. Traditional l e D s have a backlight for the whole shebang. That means that some light tends to bleed through l e D screens, so you can't really display true blacks on screen very effectively. They typically come out as more of like a dark charcoal gray, uh so, so you don't get good contrast with really dark sequences. I have had really bad experiences trying to watch Batman movies on l e ED displays because of that. So I don't know how much these televisions and computer monitors are going to cost. My guess is it will be a heck of a lot. We're talking on the premium side of technology, oh lad. Screens are still expensive in general, much less so than they were just a few years ago. I mean a few years ago you were talking about tens of thousands of dollars. It's much less than that now. But my guess is that the q d O LED screens are going to be super prisy when they first come out and limited to the real high rollers out there with the crazy home theater setups. And finally rounding out our c S segments, Sony has introduced an suv, which just seems like a weird series of words to say. Sony is known for its consumer electronics like televisions and Walkman's and such, but an suv. Well. Last year, Sony showed off an electric car concept called the Vision S, but the company made it clear that the car was simply a prototype and it was never going to go into production. The company was not going to get into the car business right then and there. It was more of a platform upon which Sony could display numerous technologies that could be incorporated into vehicles made by other companies. This year, Sony introduced the Vision s O two and electric suv. It's also act with Sony Technology Moreover. This time, Sony exacts say the company is considering the possibility of going into production with this suv, so there's no commitment. So my guess is that the chances of Sony actually producing the s O two are pretty low, but there is a chance. Sony did announce the formation of a new subsidiary called Sony Mobility Incorporated, which will be in the business of developing and producing electric vehicles. So Sony is getting into the electric car business. They have created a subsidiary just for that. So if the Vision s O two never materializes as a consumer vehicle, I'm sure we will see cars and SUVs descended from the s O two is design in the future. The prototype that they showed off included sensors and systems for autonomous driving, though again I hastened to add, no one has developed a fully autonomous vehicle yet, but again it was kind of a showcase Sony technology. Okay, that's the c E S round up. Let's talk about some other news before we conclude. Uh, well, one thing is that Google continues to give its employees reasons to be angry at the company. Google is a publicly traded company. That means that the company has to file documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission or SEC in the United States and include stuff like you know how much revenue they generated, what their expenses were, what are the executive salaries? That kind of thing, And a recent SEC filing showed that Google has given a group of four executives a pay rise. They went from a salary of six fifty thousand dollars a year to one million dollars a year each, with a potential bonus of up to two million dollars plus company shares worth millions more. Now, that alone might not be enough to upset humble Googlers, except only a couple of weeks ago. In the dying days of one, employees were told that the company was probably not going to issue employee raises to compensate for inflation, so there was not going to be a salary adjustment to help employees deal with the fact at inflation is a thing. So your average Google employee isn't getting a raise or pay adjustment. But these four executives are seeing their salaries nearly double. It is not, as they say, a good look. France also isn't giving good looks towards Google and also Meta slash Facebook. French regulators have issued fines for both companies, citing issues with the companies using cookies to track user activities see in France, especially really in the European Union. In general, citizens are supposed to have full control over that kind of stuff, over their information. They're supposed to be able to opt out of cookies and having their data tracked and leveraged, and it's supposed to be easy and transparent. But the regulators say that both Google and Meta have failed to meet those standards. In Google's case, the fine amounts to around a hundred fifty million euros that's about a hundred sixty nine point five million US dollars, and then a slash Facebook faces a fine of six sea million euros or around sixty eight million dollars. Moreover, the two companies have three months to fix things and remove those cookies, or at least give French citizens options to opt out that aren't buried in settings menus and made very difficult to find. If the companies failed to do that, then they will get find one thousand euros per day that they failed to meet those standards. Interestingly, in the United States, there is a move to push for data privacy laws that sound to be similar to the ones under g DPR in Europe. The argument mostly centers around how social network sites like Facebook have served as a way to radicalize people and to spread misinformation, even though presumably that is not the intent of those companies. Basically, the argument goes like this, These companies collect user data to determine what to serve to those users to keep them on the platform as long as possible. The content served to users starts to push them to increasingly radicalized groups and facilitates the spread of misinformation. The platforms scoop up the cash because their concern is just keeping the folks on the sites for as long as possible. It doesn't matter to them what is being shown to those users to make that happen, So, say the advocates, what is needed are more stringent data privacy laws that would prevent companies from vacuuming up personal details left, right and center and give the power back to the individual to decide what they want and don't want to share with these companies and how it gets used now that undercuts the entire system and it protects user privacy. This is an interesting angle to take see. Over in Europe, the general message was g d p R is about protecting citizen privacy and giving them, you know, more agency. Here in the US, it's being framed more about curtailing radicalization and the spread of misinformation. Anyway, while there's a movement a way to push for those regulations here in the United States, there are a lot of steps that have to be taken before we ever see anything like that actually happened. And then a couple more stories. Russia's space program had a bit of a whoop see this week. Actually, the whoop see happened last week, but the ultimate consequence of the whoop see happened yesterday. Namely, Russia launched an Angara, a five heavy lift rocket which was carrying a pur Si or per C a p E R S E I my Russian is non existent. Anyway, They launched an upper stage booster as a test mission to test that booster, and unfortunately the test was a failure. Uh the Angara lifted off as it was supposed to, but when it's separated with the upper stage, the upper stage failed to attain orbit, so it didn't get high enough to avoid falling back to Earth, which it finally did yesterday. It launched late last week, but the the the the uncontrolled descent of the upper stage happened yesterday, several pieces plunging into the Pacific Ocean in an uncontrolled re entry, which is the nice space way of saying a crash. And finally, I mentioned earlier that we would talk a little bit more about n f t s. One thing I did not think we would hear a lot about with n f t s would be art heists because it's a digital token, right, it's a representation of ownership. I didn't think, oh, this is gonna be a heist thing. And I guess you could break into someone's home or their office and try to steal a physical hard drive that holds the wallet that contains those n f t s, but then you have to figure out how to get access to it. Now it turns out I am way too shortsighted. Hackers using phishing techniques were able to steal fifteen n f t s from a an art uh gallery owner named Todd Kramer. These n f T s, which included ape cartoons from the board Ape Yacht Club, which is why I was referencing apes earlier. They were valued at more than two million dollars because, and I cannot stress this enough, n f T s are stupid. Anyway, the hackers gained access to Kramer's n f T wallet through fishing and then went on to sell those n f T s. They had control of them, so they went ahead and sold them. And n f T platform called open c that's s e A helped Cramer out and froze the stolen n f T s on the market and helped him retrieve at least some of them. But even that action has caused a stir in the n f T community. See if a platform can intervene and prevent or reverse n f T transactions, well then that whole decentralized, unregulated market thing kind of starts to fall apart. So ironically, the fact that Kramer was able to retrieve at least some of his n f T s might mean that we could see confidence waiver with n f T s as a whole, and the value of that collection could take a hit. Then again, maybe it won't. Maybe it really will just go to the moon and the only person who will be left out will be me. But you know what, I'm okay with that. I don't mind if I'm wrong about this. I worry about it. I worry that a lot of n f t s are just scams, and that the ones that are quote unquote legit are just scams in in waiting, like they weren't necessarily intended to be scams. But I think that I'm I'm worried that there won't be any there there, and then it will all fall apart and people will lose a lot of money. I'm hoping that the people who lose a lot of money are people who kind of deserve to lose a lot of money. But my worry is that, you know, good people who got suckered in will be the victims of this, and I don't want to see that happen. Okay, that's it. That's the news for a Thursday, January six two. This was a long one for a news episode, but we had a lot of ce S stuff to get through. If you have suggestions for topics I should over in future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me on Twitter. The handle for the show is text stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech 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. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jothan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and how the Tech Area. It is time for the tech News for Thursday, January six, twenty twenty two, and we're gonna focus a lot on c E S in this episode. So we're gonna look with a at a roundup of some of the interesting things, uh that I learned about at C E S two. Full disclosure, I didn't go to c E S. I mostly was following the reporting of others and you know, kind of looking at all the different stuff that companies were promoting. But I did not attend. I thought that it was irresponsible for me to go, not projecting that on anyone else. Everyone has their reasons about going or not going, so I'm not trying to apply that to everyone. I just felt it was the wrong decision for me. But in Tuesday's episode, I mentioned Samsung's remote control that can harvest energy from WiFi signals. Very similar to a lot of other wireless charging technologies, but this one is really cool because you don't have to set it down on like a special pad or anything. It's it's just harvesting energy from WiFi signals on its own. That to me is super cool. And I also I think I talked about smart kitty litter box that connects to stuff like Amazon's Alexa, which sounds silly on the surface of it, but I actually think it's kind of a cool idea. However, obviously there's a lot more we could talk about, so I figured I would go through some of the things I came across and I thought were interesting and talk about those. Now, keep in mind, this is the tippy tippy top of the iceberg that is c E s. You could just follow the announcements from one company and spend a week talking about it. So this is by no means the best of the best or anything like that. It's just the stuff I found interesting. And we are going to go in a particular order. It's called alphabetical, So we'll start off with the Amica robot. Amaca has spelled a M E c A. A video of Amica was posted on Twitter back in and it went viral. You might have seen it. It had a very expressive robot in it. Ce S was the first time I'm aware of where a larger audience was able to see Amica in the robotic flesh. I guess Amaca comes out of a company called Engineered Arts and they build a robot as quote, the world's most advanced human shaped robot representing the forefront of human robotics technology end quote. The big deal with Amica is that it has a very flexible and really expressive face with like eyebrow ridges and lots of points of movement around the eyes and the mouth, so it can give very human expressions. So Amica can make these really compelling facial expressions, and Engineered Arts calls it a development platform. So in other words, this is kind of a starting point or a stepping stone, which could be one of the paths that lead us to robots interacting with us within human spaces. But the folks that Engineered Arts are very quick to point out that that future is still a pretty good ways off. Amaca is a great example of using robotics to mimic human expression, but a lot of other pieces have to fall into place before you've got a robot capable of navigating through human spaces safely. For example, having a robot that can natively understand what expressions to pair with different kinds of data. That starts to get pretty complicated. Like if you were to incorporate, say a smart speaker in a robot like Amica, and you were asking it to give you news, and maybe the news is pretty dark and disturbing. You don't want Amca looking all cheery and happy while delivering that, right, that would be a disconnect. These are things that are you know, going to take time for us to really suss out. But in the nearer term, a robot like Amica could be used as like a point of information. For example, like you could go perhaps into an office building and behind a desk, you might see a robot that looks like Amica that's able to give you directions, answer basic questions about the building and the tenants in the building, perhaps um and to be able to create expressions that are human like. Now, that kind of robot would be stationary. That drastically simplifies the requirements needed for the use case. Right, they don't have to throw what doesn't have to get up and walk around? Uh, Because you know, the more the robot needs to do in order to fulfill whatever the job is, the more complicated. The design has to be. However, when you look at videos of robots from say Boston Dynamics, it only takes a little imagination to combine those capabilities with the really expressive amica and to think, yeah, you know what, it is, the robots world, and we're all just living in it. One of the neatest computer designs I saw coming out of c S two was the a sus zen Book seventeen fold. Now, as the name suggests, this is a seventeen technically seventeen point three inch foldable computer. So when folded like a laptop, so that you have you know, an upper half and then the desktop half. The top screen measures twelve and a half inches, and the bottom half can act as a virtual keyboard. You can have an on screen keyboard there. You could also pair it with a Bluetooth keyboard and either operated like your standard laptop with the Bluetooth keyboard position on top of the lower folded portion, or you can unfold the screen and use a little backstop, turn it on side and it serves as a desktop monitor. So this is another hybrid device that can perform like a tablet, a laptop, or a desktop PC. It can also serve as a multi screen display all on one screen. Now, I am notoriously negative about touch screen interfaces for computers, but if I were to go for one, this is probably what I would gravitate toward. I find it pretty interesting, it's versatile, and I gotta admit it's also kind of pretty. Uh. The o led screen is a big part of it being pretty. It's also a big part of how it can be foldable in the first place. Asus says the launch should be sometime mid year. Uh they hepefully said the year in question would be two, so sometime in the middle of this year, but there is no price information as of yet. Get ready to hear that particular phrase on repeat throughout a lot of these stories. One thing that I have started doing more since the pandemic started is to spend time at this quiet little how that that I occasionally occupy well outside of Atlanta, and I just look out at nature. The place I go to has got a lot of birds around it, and I've gotten kind of into bird watching. I just recently got a pair of inexpensive binoculars to kind of dip my toe in that. And that's why I feel I have to talk about the bird Buddy smart bird feeder, and yeah, it's a bird feeder with smart technology, which I know it sounds ridiculous. It sounds just as crazy as a smart kitty litter box, But like the kitty litter box, this thing has convinced me that I want one. See. It's a bird feeder that has an incorporated battery powered camera inside it, and the camera can take images and video of the birds that visit your feeder and send them to a connected app that's on your smartphone. And it's that connected app that I really love because not only do you get to see the little birdies as they come to visit your bird feeder, you go alert saying hey, there's a bird there. The app will actually identify the types of birds visiting your feeder and we'll give you a little bit of information on them. So it takes a picture and then identifies the bird based on the picture and tells you, oh, well, this is the bird. You know, the kind of range that it lives in, the kind of foods it likes. And it's kind of like a gamification system in the app. You can you know, collect virtual cards of the birds that visit you and you can try and catch them all, except, of course you're not catching birds, you're feeding them. The app also contains hints on how to attract more birds to the feeder. Uh. And this was an extremely successful Kickstarter project before they went to c S. Kind of reminds me of Pebble in that regard, r I p Pebble And Uh. They're now taking pre orders for bird feeders, which are, as you might have guessed, pretty expensive that we're talking two dollars for one, and that's technically a fift discount off the what is projected to be the final sales price when it does launch. The shipping is scheduled for June of twenty twenty two. And yeah, I ordered one. I know, I know it's crazy in a way to spend two hundred bucks on a bird feeder, But at the same time, I'm like, it's pretty neat. Uh. And I like the idea a lot, and I kind of want to support this company to see what else they come up with, because I love the idea of being able to observe nature without disturbing it. That's really my go to on this. But yeah, I don't know. I got a little swept up in it. Well, if you were to visit c E S you would know or you would soon find out that the North hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center is where you see most of the car stuff. One car innovation shown off during c e S was BMW's i X flow e ink tech. Alright, So e ink is the technology that's in a lot of your basic e book gadgets, like think of your old, old, old school kindles before they became tablets. So it uses a pretty simple principle in which you have els under the screen and they're filled with electrically charged pigments, typically white and black pigments, and you manipulate them with electric fields that either you know, that move them to either the surface of the display so that they're right up against the back of the screen, or they're moved back behind it where you can't see it. So let's say you've got negatively charged black pigments and positively charged white pigments. Well, opposite charges attract, so you could use a positive electric field to pull all the black pigment to the top of the cell and you've get yourself a black image on the screen. Well, e INK displays consists of tons of these cells, each filled with these electrically charged pigments. The i X flow body tech with BMW takes this concept and applies it to cars, So you can have a BMW that has a body that can actually change color on demand. The model on display at c e S could go from white to black and black to white, and could e in display changing patterns. So you've got a paint job that you can change whenever you like. You can even have it essentially be animated as you're driving. So this isn't just flashy though. It is that it can also be practical when you want to do stuff like reflect light or absorb more light depending upon weather conditions. BMW also says it's working on a color version of the tech for future vehicles. I have no idea how well this will hold up to wear and tear, and I imagine if you're in a traffic accident, it could be a little more expensive to repair than your typical body and paint job, but it's still pretty neat. We've got some more ce S stories to talk about and a couple of other things, but first let's take a quick break. Okay, we're back now. If you've dipped your toe into home automation. You know that it can get a little bit frustrating if you're not all in on a single ecosystem. Um the devices and systems typically work pretty well within their own system, but they don't always play well with each other if you mix and match. In fact, sometimes they can't communicate with each other at all, and that gets very frustrating when you're trying to you know, kit out your automated home. We've seen some movement to try and address this issue. Google, Amazon, Samsung, and Apple formed a group called MATTER that will launch later this year. The naimes to standardized technologies across home automation devices. But to confuse matters a little bit, we also now have the Home Connectivity Alliance or h c A. Samsung, by the way, also joined the h c A as well as MATTER. Maybe Samsung can be the liaison between the two standards alliance groups anyway. Other members of the h c A include g E, Train, Residential, and electro Lux. So we might slowly be moving toward the world where consumers can just freely choose which components from which companies they want to integrate into their automated home set up without having to worry if they're all compatible. It's no fun if you've got like a dozen different hubs connected to your Internet system and you have to use like three different types of smart speakers to interact with them, and remember which one controls the lights versus the air conditioning and all that kind of stuff. People just want their stuff to work, right, That's that's all we want. We just want our stuff to work, and we want to be able to pick which devices go where. So I think that's a good move. Now, those of it, y'all who who know what I look like, you might be surprised to hear my next ce S takeaway, which is the Loureal Color Sonic. This is device used to dye your hair from home without dealing with unpredictable results and all the mess that home dying jobs typically encounter. At least that's the sales pitch for the device. Now, the device looks a bit like an elect tronic brush. Uh. They have bristles that oscillate, and in between the bristles there are little nozzles. The device also has a space where you insert a cartridge of hair dye. Then they're gonna have something like forty different colors when they actually launched this thing, which will be in twenty three. The device pushes the hair dye through those nozzles that are interspersed with the bristles, and the nozzles zigzag while the bristles oscillate, and you just brush it through your hair, so you you know, it's like you're doing just a once over through each section of your hair with this thing, and then you wait about half an hour, then you rense it out and voila, says Loreal, you have a reliable, consistent home hair dye job. This device is not scheduled to launch until twenty three, like I said, and I do not know how much it will cost, nor how much the cartridges will cost. I do know that they say that for most hair dye jobs, a single cartridge will be sufficient to do the full job. And for a lot of people, you might not even use up all the dye that's in a single cartridge, and you can just hold on to that and use it for a future application so that you're not having die go to waste. Uh. Seems pretty simple, at least as simple as brushing your hair, which I admit I have not done in about twenty three years, so it's possible that it's trickier than I remember. But whatever, Okay, y'all, I live in Georgia, and even without the issues of climate change, we rarely see significance amounts of snow. You're talking like maybe an inch or inch and a half. Possibly we see more ice than snow, which is way worse. But yeah, we don't get a less snow here. And since the weather this week the first week of January was hovering around seventy degrees fahrenheit, I suspect it might be a while before I get another big snowfall in my life. But for y'all who do see snow, maybe you would be interested in the Moonbike's snowbike. So yeah, it's an electric bike for the snow kind of like a paired down snowmobile. The handlebars steer a ski that's in the front, and the whole thing is propelled with a battery powered snow tread that's in the back half of the snowbike. I wouldn't be surprised to see something like this in a James Bond film, only I don't know that it lives up to Bonds, you know, very demanding specifications It's two thirds the size of a normal snowmobile, and according to Moonbike's CEO, the bike can hold up to two batteries. You can mount two different batteries in it, and each battery provides up to one and a half hour's worth of writing time. Again, that's according to the CEO. I saw other people suggest that it might be closer to like forty five minutes, which is a significant smaller amount of time, like half the time. But I don't know. I haven't actually tested these. But unlike a lot of other stuff at c e S, this is a product that's actually launched right now. You can order one here in the United States and expect delivery before the end of January. Now, if you're wondering how much it costs, well, it'll set you back at minimum around bucks. That's eight thousand, five hundred dollars. That's without adding a second battery or other options. It also doesn't include taxes, so you will be actually paying more than that. But hey, if you got around you know, like ten grand to burn, and you've got a ton of snow to tool around in, maybe this could be your new toy. I think it sounds pretty neat, but it's obviously meant for you know, someone else, like not me. And our next two items are all about virtual reality, and you know, VR has had a real slow burn as far as mass adoption goes. Part of that might be because traditionally VR headsets are bulky and uncomfortable to wear. In fact, the first time I ever wore a VR headset, it was supported by cables from the ceiling in order to take some of the weight off of the user, because otherwise it would just been too heavy. Plus I think I was like twelve at the time. It probably would have crushed me. I was, I was a wee up of a lad. But Panasonic is introducing a lightweight headset called the Megan X VR glasses. Megan X is really hard for me to say. It looks like Megan the name Megan followed by X. So if your ex's name Megan, maybe it'll be easy for you. Anyway. These glasses weigh in at about half a pound or just over eight ounces. The glasses look kind of like those sunglasses you see that have the shields around them that blackout light from the sides. I always think of Judge Doom from who framed Roger Rabbit or David Tennant's Crowley from Good Omens, the television adaptation. Anyway, these obviously do not have transparent lenses because it's a VR headset, it's not an augmented reality headset. And there are speakers embedded in the frames of the glasses. I don't know if it's bone conduction or if it's just regular speakers. Um. And the frames actually do fold, so the the ears pieces do fold down like a classic pair of glasses do. And the display in these things is no joke. It's able to project five point two K resolution video with high dynamic range a K a h d R, which you know, provides those really vibrant, lifelike colors. And there's some stuff we don't know yet, like we don't know when it's going to be launched, we don't know how much it are gonna cost. We don't know whether or not they're going to be wireless or if you're going to be tethered to a PC in order to use them. Obviously, that's another big barrier to adoption for VR. Most people aren't too keen on having to be connected to a device. It limits your movement, so that's you know, the price, the weight, and tethering I think are three big barriers to mass adoption, but um, you know, this one looks pretty cool. I'm still not sold on VR becoming mainstream just yet, but this could be a look into a future that maybe could see more widespread adoption, at least among the those of you out there who could afford it. I don't count myself among those, by the way. And the other big VR story out of c e S is the PlayStation VR two and the VR two Sense controllers. Uh. This system is designed specifically for the PS five, which I'm told exists, but you know, it's still really hard to find one. The headset provides four K video with HDR and a one degree field of view. The display is an O LED display, and Sony says that the frame rate should be between ninety two one hurts. Frame rate is how many frames are presented to you per second. Generally speaking, you want a lot of frames to give a nice smooth experience. You want around at least sixty hurts typically for like the high end gamers, so hurts is good. It's also got eye tracking technology built into it, so not only can the headset track the way you turn your head, you can also detect what your eyes are looking at. That could potentially be useful for future game developers if they can find ways to incorporate eye tracking features that are a natural fit for the game. Obviously, just throwing it in there to throw it in there that never works out. We've seen it fail with stuff like the connect. But if you can find a way to incorporate it in a way that is fun and makes sense, maybe includes like accessibility features for people who otherwise would have trouble playing these things, I think that's great. The Sense controllers have haptic feedback. I always just think of that as a good old rumble pack and adaptive triggers, so in other words, the tension on the triggers can change. So Sony said, imagine that you're drawing an arrow in a bow. You might actually feel the resistance and the trigger to represent the resistance you would feel as you start to draw the bowstring back. Sony will be releasing a Horizon game for this system called Horizon Call of the Mountain, and it will be a VR showcase for this particular system. It was actually developed for VR from the beginning, so it's not a game that's been adapted for VR, but is this often the case with gadgets at c e S. We have no release date or price for it yet. I expect we'll hear a lot more of it later in the year. Sony typically holds one or two big events virtual events at least throughout the year, so I'm sure we'll hear more about it then. All right, we have a couple more stories to go before we get to that. Let's take another quick break. So it sounds like the metaverse was all over CEES this year. Actually followed a Twitter thread that was documenting different examples of booths that incorporated the phrase or the term metaverse in them, sometimes with no real obvious connection to anything that you might think of as a metaverse, but it is definitely out there in terms of marketing and buzz. As for anything practical, that's a totally different matter. But some stuff that frequently gets lumped in with the metaverse did get shown off at c S, namely n F T S. Samsung is the culprit here and they showed off their two thousand, twenty two connected TVs that will support art n F T S. N F T S, by the way, that's non fungible tokens if somehow you have avoided the term up to this point. And n f T I can really represent anything digital. It doesn't have to be like a digital piece of art that you look at. It could be anything digital. And it's kind of like a certificate of ownership. Like if you've ever seen those commercials where you can own a star and you get a certificate that says you're the owner of the star. I would argue that n f T s are pretty much the same thing as that. So what does this mean practically? That is hard to say because digital goods, being digital, are really easy to copy and distribute. So you have ownership of something that you don't actually have. You don't have control over it, you have ownership of it. It's it's a weird thing. It's also you know, it's not like a one of a kind physical work of art, right where there's only one of them that exists. All the rest are copies or prints or whatever, but only one true one exists and it can inhabit a physical space. The tokens just represent ownership. But Samsung TVs will let you display the n f T art that you own in your home, so you can show off those eight cartoons to all your guests as they walk through your classy high rise penthouse apartment. That's just the way I imagine enough T people living. Uh. And then you get to explain to your guests why you paid tens of thousands of dollars for eight cartoons. More on that later in this episode. Also, apparently you'll be able to purchase and sell n f T art through Samsung's televisions. And can you tell that I hate this already? For the record, I don't mind thinking of n f T s as a way to support an artist, at least not, you know, on the surface of it. But then after artists sells in n f T, I don't think you're supporting the artist anymore like that. That's that one point of sale, right the artist sells an n f T representing something they've created, they make money off of it. You have supported the artists. But then let's say you turn around and you sell the n f T you bought for, say twenty bucks, and you sell it to someone else for a hundred bucks, and then that person turns around they sell it to someone else for a thousand bucks. And this keeps on going until the bottom falls out. Well, the original artist only sees that first twenty bucks, right, It's not like they're getting kickbacks of all these other sales, and so you're not really supporting the artist. I would argue, it's really more of a speculation engine that just keeps going until it falls apart. At least that's how I see it. And maybe I'm one of the blind who isn't releasing the promise of n f T s. That's how they come across to me anyway. Uh, Samsung is letting you show that n f T art on your television and we'll let you look at the metadata and everything. Yeah. Uh. The other reason I'm not super crazy about n f t s is they're built on top of the Ethereum blockchain, and at least as of now, Ethereum is still on a proof of work model of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency mining, which means it plays into the conspicuous consumption of electricity and thus is a contributor to stuff like carbon emissions and climate change. Not really crazy about any of that anyway. Yeah, Samsung TVs are r l in on that. Something else Samsung did was they finally got into the o LED game. See Samsung TVs for a while have been based on l e ED technology, and they have created their own tech called q LEAD that stands for Quantum Dot l e ED displays. But this year Samsung showed off TV screens and computer monitors using oh LAD technology while incorporating the quantum dot technology with it. With an oh LAD screen, every single pixel, that is, every single point of light you see on the screen is its own back light, so you can you can illuminate an individual pixel and not illuminate anything else. So oh LAD screens are able to show off scenes that have really dark colors like true black, in a better way than traditional l e D screens can. Traditional l e D s have a backlight for the whole shebang. That means that some light tends to bleed through l e D screens, so you can't really display true blacks on screen very effectively. They typically come out as more of like a dark charcoal gray, uh so, so you don't get good contrast with really dark sequences. I have had really bad experiences trying to watch Batman movies on l e ED displays because of that. So I don't know how much these televisions and computer monitors are going to cost. My guess is it will be a heck of a lot. We're talking on the premium side of technology, oh lad. Screens are still expensive in general, much less so than they were just a few years ago. I mean a few years ago you were talking about tens of thousands of dollars. It's much less than that now. But my guess is that the q d O LED screens are going to be super prisy when they first come out and limited to the real high rollers out there with the crazy home theater setups. And finally rounding out our c S segments, Sony has introduced an suv, which just seems like a weird series of words to say. Sony is known for its consumer electronics like televisions and Walkman's and such, but an suv. Well. Last year, Sony showed off an electric car concept called the Vision S, but the company made it clear that the car was simply a prototype and it was never going to go into production. The company was not going to get into the car business right then and there. It was more of a platform upon which Sony could display numerous technologies that could be incorporated into vehicles made by other companies. This year, Sony introduced the Vision s O two and electric suv. It's also act with Sony Technology Moreover. This time, Sony exacts say the company is considering the possibility of going into production with this suv, so there's no commitment. So my guess is that the chances of Sony actually producing the s O two are pretty low, but there is a chance. Sony did announce the formation of a new subsidiary called Sony Mobility Incorporated, which will be in the business of developing and producing electric vehicles. So Sony is getting into the electric car business. They have created a subsidiary just for that. So if the Vision s O two never materializes as a consumer vehicle, I'm sure we will see cars and SUVs descended from the s O two is design in the future. The prototype that they showed off included sensors and systems for autonomous driving, though again I hastened to add, no one has developed a fully autonomous vehicle yet, but again it was kind of a showcase Sony technology. Okay, that's the c E S round up. Let's talk about some other news before we conclude. Uh, well, one thing is that Google continues to give its employees reasons to be angry at the company. Google is a publicly traded company. That means that the company has to file documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission or SEC in the United States and include stuff like you know how much revenue they generated, what their expenses were, what are the executive salaries? That kind of thing, And a recent SEC filing showed that Google has given a group of four executives a pay rise. They went from a salary of six fifty thousand dollars a year to one million dollars a year each, with a potential bonus of up to two million dollars plus company shares worth millions more. Now, that alone might not be enough to upset humble Googlers, except only a couple of weeks ago. In the dying days of one, employees were told that the company was probably not going to issue employee raises to compensate for inflation, so there was not going to be a salary adjustment to help employees deal with the fact at inflation is a thing. So your average Google employee isn't getting a raise or pay adjustment. But these four executives are seeing their salaries nearly double. It is not, as they say, a good look. France also isn't giving good looks towards Google and also Meta slash Facebook. French regulators have issued fines for both companies, citing issues with the companies using cookies to track user activities see in France, especially really in the European Union. In general, citizens are supposed to have full control over that kind of stuff, over their information. They're supposed to be able to opt out of cookies and having their data tracked and leveraged, and it's supposed to be easy and transparent. But the regulators say that both Google and Meta have failed to meet those standards. In Google's case, the fine amounts to around a hundred fifty million euros that's about a hundred sixty nine point five million US dollars, and then a slash Facebook faces a fine of six sea million euros or around sixty eight million dollars. Moreover, the two companies have three months to fix things and remove those cookies, or at least give French citizens options to opt out that aren't buried in settings menus and made very difficult to find. If the companies failed to do that, then they will get find one thousand euros per day that they failed to meet those standards. Interestingly, in the United States, there is a move to push for data privacy laws that sound to be similar to the ones under g DPR in Europe. The argument mostly centers around how social network sites like Facebook have served as a way to radicalize people and to spread misinformation, even though presumably that is not the intent of those companies. Basically, the argument goes like this, These companies collect user data to determine what to serve to those users to keep them on the platform as long as possible. The content served to users starts to push them to increasingly radicalized groups and facilitates the spread of misinformation. The platforms scoop up the cash because their concern is just keeping the folks on the sites for as long as possible. It doesn't matter to them what is being shown to those users to make that happen, So, say the advocates, what is needed are more stringent data privacy laws that would prevent companies from vacuuming up personal details left, right and center and give the power back to the individual to decide what they want and don't want to share with these companies and how it gets used now that undercuts the entire system and it protects user privacy. This is an interesting angle to take see. Over in Europe, the general message was g d p R is about protecting citizen privacy and giving them, you know, more agency. Here in the US, it's being framed more about curtailing radicalization and the spread of misinformation. Anyway, while there's a movement a way to push for those regulations here in the United States, there are a lot of steps that have to be taken before we ever see anything like that actually happened. And then a couple more stories. Russia's space program had a bit of a whoop see this week. Actually, the whoop see happened last week, but the ultimate consequence of the whoop see happened yesterday. Namely, Russia launched an Angara, a five heavy lift rocket which was carrying a pur Si or per C a p E R S E I my Russian is non existent. Anyway, They launched an upper stage booster as a test mission to test that booster, and unfortunately the test was a failure. Uh the Angara lifted off as it was supposed to, but when it's separated with the upper stage, the upper stage failed to attain orbit, so it didn't get high enough to avoid falling back to Earth, which it finally did yesterday. It launched late last week, but the the the the uncontrolled descent of the upper stage happened yesterday, several pieces plunging into the Pacific Ocean in an uncontrolled re entry, which is the nice space way of saying a crash. And finally, I mentioned earlier that we would talk a little bit more about n f t s. One thing I did not think we would hear a lot about with n f t s would be art heists because it's a digital token, right, it's a representation of ownership. I didn't think, oh, this is gonna be a heist thing. And I guess you could break into someone's home or their office and try to steal a physical hard drive that holds the wallet that contains those n f t s, but then you have to figure out how to get access to it. Now it turns out I am way too shortsighted. Hackers using phishing techniques were able to steal fifteen n f t s from a an art uh gallery owner named Todd Kramer. These n f T s, which included ape cartoons from the board Ape Yacht Club, which is why I was referencing apes earlier. They were valued at more than two million dollars because, and I cannot stress this enough, n f T s are stupid. Anyway, the hackers gained access to Kramer's n f T wallet through fishing and then went on to sell those n f T s. They had control of them, so they went ahead and sold them. And n f T platform called open c that's s e A helped Cramer out and froze the stolen n f T s on the market and helped him retrieve at least some of them. But even that action has caused a stir in the n f T community. See if a platform can intervene and prevent or reverse n f T transactions, well then that whole decentralized, unregulated market thing kind of starts to fall apart. So ironically, the fact that Kramer was able to retrieve at least some of his n f T s might mean that we could see confidence waiver with n f T s as a whole, and the value of that collection could take a hit. Then again, maybe it won't. Maybe it really will just go to the moon and the only person who will be left out will be me. But you know what, I'm okay with that. I don't mind if I'm wrong about this. I worry about it. I worry that a lot of n f t s are just scams, and that the ones that are quote unquote legit are just scams in in waiting, like they weren't necessarily intended to be scams. But I think that I'm I'm worried that there won't be any there there, and then it will all fall apart and people will lose a lot of money. I'm hoping that the people who lose a lot of money are people who kind of deserve to lose a lot of money. But my worry is that, you know, good people who got suckered in will be the victims of this, and I don't want to see that happen. Okay, that's it. That's the news for a Thursday, January six two. This was a long one for a news episode, but we had a lot of ce S stuff to get through. If you have suggestions for topics I should over in future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me on Twitter. The handle for the show is text stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech 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.