Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland. I'mint executive producer with I Heart Radio and how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for Thursday, August eleven, twenty twenty two. Cisco, company that primarily focuses on networking hardware and telecommunications equipment, as well as some I T security products, has admitted that it was hit by a ransomware attack that, as they say, is a tough pill to swallow, but it also illustrates how there's no such thing as a bulletproof defense when it comes to data security. Fortunately, according to Cisco reps, the attackers only gained access to some non critical information. The company released a statement that says, quote Cisco did not identify any impact to our business as a result of the incident, including Cisco products or services, sensitive customer data or sensitive employee information, intellectual property, or supply chain operations end quote. The statement did recognize that the hackers released on the dark web a list of files that they were able to access, and it included stuff like nondisclosure agreements and some sketches and stuff. The attack actually happened back in May, we're just hearing about it now, and Cisco reps say the company has already taken action to limit access to any other file systems, and that the attackers got access by compromising and employee's account. Apparently, they first were able to gain control of the employee's personal Google account and that allowed them to use the SINC credentials in Chrome to access Cisco systems. They also tricked the employee into revealing a multi factor authentication code. You know, it's the kind of thing that when you put in your password, it says, all right, we're sending a a code to your cell phone. That sort of stuff, And that just goes to show that you can employ very secure processes, but they only work if people, you know, follow them. And that's really why we can't have bulletproof defenses. So, for one thing, creating something that has no vulnerabilities, that's pretty darn hard. They are creating a system that has no footholds for hackers, very difficult to do. But another is that people are frequently the weakest link in the security chain, as was in this case, So you don't have to be the most leait hacker in the world if you can convince someone to hand you the keys to the kingdom. The attackers then used various tools to create backdoor access points within the system, so that even when the Cisco security team detected them and gave them the boot, they could worm their way back in, and it took some time to weed out all those issues. The attackers did, not, however, encrypt Cisco's files, which is something we typically see with somewhere attacks. The attackers were identified as being part of the Jan Lua Wong gang. Yon Lua Wong is the name of a particular type of ransomware, so Cisco reps say they suspect that the group were likely planning on deploying ransomware, but had not actually gone that far before they got weeded out. Over at Google, employees are feeling a quote unquote real vibe change. At least according to one unnamed source who talked with Business Insider, Google has extended its hiring freeze, which began in late July and continues on today, and there are growing concerns that Google could initiate layoffs or institute tougher performance measures that employees will have to meet, and if they don't meet them, they might be considered for termination. Sindar pach I, the CEO of Google, has said that the company's head count and its productivity don't seem to match up, so essentially suggesting that Google has two many employees for the amount of work that's actually being done. So the worry is that the tougher performance measures could be a way to judge which employees are pulling more weight than others, and then the company might move to eliminate the employees who are seen to be falling behind. This kind of echoes something that met US CEO Mark Zuckerberg said a couple of months back about Meta, namely that quote there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here end quote. Now, in Meta's case, the strategy appears to be to turn up the pressure on employees and then see who sticks around. The idea being that the folks who aren't best suited for the company will drop off first. You know, if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen kind of thing. Now, personally, I don't think that's the best strategy because you could end up alienating some of your best employees who figure they can just go somewhere else and have be treated better. Right. That's getting increasingly difficult during these tough economic times. So maybe you could amble with that, but you can really end up with a lower head count without a guarantee that the people who stuck around are you know, the best ones. But what do I know? Anyway, We're seeing these sort of attitudes across the entire tech sector, particularly in these larger organizations. And you know, just as a rule, I have noticed that as organizations grow to gargantuan size, workload can end up spreading out over to a point where your average employee might not have that much actual work to do um And in fact, you see this with government agencies a lot, where some government employees spend most of their work days trying to look busy to justify the fact that they have a position. Now, to be clear, that is not the employee's fault. It's more of a sign of poor management and planning. And it just stinks when you realize that you've reached that point and then you have to make moves to correct course, because frequently that means you've got to let some folks go, and that's tough. On a similar note Microsoft is shutting down a department it first established in two thousand eighteen. The group is called the Modern Life Experiences Team, which I mean that name doesn't give you much of a hint about what the heck is going on over there, right Well, as it turns out, the role of the Modern Life Experiences Team was to win back professional consumers or pro sumers. So this was kind of a customer retention group, although more than retention, because retention just sounds like you're trying to keep folks there. Their job was to convince folks who had actively moved away from Microsoft products and services to come back into the fold. Anyway, the group consists of around two people, and those folks now are being told they have to find another position within Microsoft, so they can apply to work somewhere else within the company, or they can leave and take severance and at least they're gonna get several so that's something. So this isn't a case of Microsoft turning up the heat to try and get people to jump ship, because if they did that, then you know, people who are leaving they might not be qualified to get a severance package if they're leaving on their own. So that's something. It's a pretty tarnished silver lining, but it's better than nothing. You know. There's been a ton of business news lately because all the big public companies have been holding their various earnings calls for the end of a quarter. Most of them it's Q two, for some it might be Q three. It all depends on where they're their UH fiscal year starts, because it doesn't always start at the same time as the calendar year. And we've learned a lot of things in this process. We learned like how Warner Brothers Discovery merger has led to the superhero film bat Girl being shelved permanently. Reportedly, David Zaslov, who's the CEO of this merged company, felt that bat Girl was more valuable as a hacks right off than as a film, since it was destined really to just go to streaming rather than a theatrical release, and reportedly it would need more money to finish the film, and it had already gone over its initial million dollar budget up to ninety million, and so I guess the call was made that rather than pour more money into it, they could just write it off. Now, the story goes that the company only will receive the tax right off if bat Girl never gets a commercial release in any form, streaming or otherwise. If that's true, that means there's no hope for folks to ever see this movie unless the footage got leaked somehow. And there are a lot of people who are curious about it, some because they love the character back Girl, some because Michael Keaton is supposed to be in the movie as Batman, and of course he was Batman in the early nineties with the Tim Burton films, the the to that Tim Burton directed. So they're been a lot of curiosity about this movie, but it sounds like there's no chance of anyone actually seeing it, and it's caused a lot of folks to get angry. And obviously the filmmakers and the people involved in the project are disappointed. No one wants to work on something only to be told that work is never going to be seen. And let me tell you has someone who has once worked for David Zaslov. Though I was way way, way, way way under his radar, I can understand getting a little miffed at some of Zaslov's decisions. I got miffed at some of his decisions back when I was working for Discovery Communications. Zaslov has said that the plan is to cut around three billion dollars of costs out from this merged company, and he says that that might actually be on the conservative side, and that has a lot of folks worried. I can actually right now think of an entire company, a content company that could be on the chopping block. I would think the most likely fate for it would be to have gets sold off to some other entity, but it's too early to make any actual predictions. Zaslov has also indicated that it makes no economic sense to make high cost content for streaming platforms because you don't get a very big return on that investment. It ends up costing you more than you can make. And this is something that we see echoed on other streaming platforms, including on Netflix. And it's really no secret. I mean, everyone knew that Netflix was pouring truckloads of money into producing content in an effort to attract subscribers, and once those subscriber numbers began flagging a bit, investors got really worried. And we'll talk about other streaming services that have also had to reckon with the high cost of doing business after we come back from the break. Meanwhile, zas Lov has indicated that expensive productions really should just be targeted toward theatrical release, where a healthy box office could produce a good return. How to make streaming work from a profitability standpoint is a high priority because cable and satellite TV subscription numbers continue to drop, particularly here in the United States, and Zaslav is a cable guy through and through. That's the world he comes from, and that means he has to find a new model before the old one goes completely belly up. While he didn't go into detail, the general takeaway is that this new company, Warner Brothers Discovery, is going to combine HBO Max within the Discovery Plus streaming service or perhaps create a new merged one have a unified streaming service with different verticals or channels of content. So HBO Max isn't gonna go away. In fact, Zaslav called it the crown Jewel, but it will be incorporated into something bigger. At least that's the assumption right now, and also that there are expected layoffs coming from across both Discovery and Warner Brothers units in the not too distant future. We've got a lot more to talk about today. Before we get to it, let's take a quick break. Okay, we're back. Let's talk about Disney, because Disney also held an earnings call recently, and there's tons we could talk about there, but I'm really gonna look more at streaming services. Disney subscriber numbers for its digital streaming services totaled two one million people. That means, for the first time, a streaming service or collection of them really has posted higher subscriber numbers than Netflix. Netflix is behind Disney's services by about five hundred thousand subscribers total. But you heard the caveat there. This is not a single streaming service from Disney we're talking about. It's a collection of them. So Disney achieved this by having multiple streaming services. Netflix is just Netflix, but at Disney you've got Disney Plus, ESPN Plus, and Hulu. Now, out of those three, Disney Plus as the greatest number of subscribers at a hundred fifty two million. So if we break it down by service, Netflix is still way ahead. It's ahead of even Disney Plus. But it's not all good news anyway, and at least not to customers, because the rising costs of production. You know, those Marvel series ain't cheap, even if snarky folks do poke fun at the c g I at times. That means that Disney is going to pass those costs down to you, the viewer. Yep, a Disney Plus subscription is going to get more expensive starting December eight. Right now, a basic subscription costs seven dollars nine cents per month here in the US, and on December eight, that's going to increase to ten dollars and nine cents per month, which is a thirty eight percent increase. But hey, if you want, you could just stick with seven dollars cents a month, because Disney is introducing a tier at that price that will be including commercials, so it's ads supported, So if you don't mind ads in your programming, you can just keep paying what you're paying right now, you know, for an ad free experience. So in a way you get extra content because you get commercials too. Starting to sound like as lot who lose prices also going up. The ads supported tier will go from six dollars cents to seven dollars nine cents per month, and the ad free version will go from twelve to four that is effective October tenth. Disney previously had already announced that ESPN plus rates would increase by so they're all going up. I'm definitely grumpy about this, you know, just to keep it in the Disney family. But at the same time, it's kind of hard to protest this move. I mean, Disney's numbers reveal that the streaming divisions have been losing money collectively across all three platforms. They have lost one point one billion dollars in this most recent quarter. That's more than three million dollars over what analysts had predicted, and it shows that these services have really gone all out in an effort to attract subscribers by funding this very expensive programming that's on the services. Unfortunately, the number of incoming subscribers is not offsetting the investment being made to get them in the first place. So that only opens up a few options. Right, You could scale way back on production, which is what Zaslov is doing over at Warner Brothers Discovery, or you could hike up prices to your customers, which is what we're seeing at Disney. Or you might do a combination of both. This may mean that we will eventually enter into an era of fewer prestige productions for streaming platforms that the business just won't support it. And that's gonna be rough for creators and for audiences, but it might also be necessary. The balance of art and commerce is never an easy one, and often we'll see the scales tipe direction or the other, and then things will eventually level out, and then we typically started up all over again. Under the Trump administration, the Federal Communications Commission held an auction for companies to win a bid that would give them a portion of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, and that funds purpose is to provide money for Internet service providers to extend connectivity service to unserved and underserved communities, primarily rural communities that have limited or no access to Internet service providers. As it stands, one company that one a bid was Starlink, the space X unit that uses a network of tiny satellites to provide Internet connectivity to customers. But now the FCC has effectively changed its mind now. To be fair, the FCC changes dramatically from one presidential administration to the next, and it's a very different organization under Biden than it was under Trump. The f C C has now rejected Starlinks bid, which would have seen the unit of SpaceX received more than eight hundred eighty million dollars in government aid to flesh out its broadband offerings. So why the change of mind, Well, the FCC chair Jessica Rosenworzel said that Starlink wasn't really a proven entity and that's relying on quote developing technology end quote, meaning that the company cannot assure the f c C that it will live up to its part of the deal. Specifically, she said, quote, we cannot afford to subsidize ventures that are not delivering the promise speeds or are not likely to meet program requirements end quote. She also pointed out that starlinks model requires customers to purchase a six hundred dollar dish that definitely prices out a large number of households. And if your goal is to extend internet connectivity to unserved or underserved communities, part of that usually includes making sure that the solutions are going to be affordable to lower income households. It would be a bad look, as they say, to subsidize a company that had a really high initial price for customers, and that's before you start factoring in things like monthly service fees. The FCC also denied a bid from a company called lt D Broadband, which had won a one point three billion dollar bid back in the reason for the fccs rejection of that bid was that lt D failed to receive eligible telecommunications carrier status in seven of the fifteen states where it bid, and the FCC determined that lt D would be unable to actually deploy a network on the scale that the winning bids had been based upon. As the FCC pointed out, there is a limited amount of government money set aside to help extend broadband access, and so it's of chief importance that what little money there is be spent effectively. Though how you do that in the country where there are so few viable options for I sp S is beyond me. And that's all the news I have for today, Thursday, August eleven two. I hope that you are all well. Reach out to me if you have any suggestions for future topics on tech Stuff, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Yes, tex 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 Jonathan Strickland. I'mint executive producer with I Heart Radio and how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for Thursday, August eleven, twenty twenty two. Cisco, company that primarily focuses on networking hardware and telecommunications equipment, as well as some I T security products, has admitted that it was hit by a ransomware attack that, as they say, is a tough pill to swallow, but it also illustrates how there's no such thing as a bulletproof defense when it comes to data security. Fortunately, according to Cisco reps, the attackers only gained access to some non critical information. The company released a statement that says, quote Cisco did not identify any impact to our business as a result of the incident, including Cisco products or services, sensitive customer data or sensitive employee information, intellectual property, or supply chain operations end quote. The statement did recognize that the hackers released on the dark web a list of files that they were able to access, and it included stuff like nondisclosure agreements and some sketches and stuff. The attack actually happened back in May, we're just hearing about it now, and Cisco reps say the company has already taken action to limit access to any other file systems, and that the attackers got access by compromising and employee's account. Apparently, they first were able to gain control of the employee's personal Google account and that allowed them to use the SINC credentials in Chrome to access Cisco systems. They also tricked the employee into revealing a multi factor authentication code. You know, it's the kind of thing that when you put in your password, it says, all right, we're sending a a code to your cell phone. That sort of stuff, And that just goes to show that you can employ very secure processes, but they only work if people, you know, follow them. And that's really why we can't have bulletproof defenses. So, for one thing, creating something that has no vulnerabilities, that's pretty darn hard. They are creating a system that has no footholds for hackers, very difficult to do. But another is that people are frequently the weakest link in the security chain, as was in this case, So you don't have to be the most leait hacker in the world if you can convince someone to hand you the keys to the kingdom. The attackers then used various tools to create backdoor access points within the system, so that even when the Cisco security team detected them and gave them the boot, they could worm their way back in, and it took some time to weed out all those issues. The attackers did, not, however, encrypt Cisco's files, which is something we typically see with somewhere attacks. The attackers were identified as being part of the Jan Lua Wong gang. Yon Lua Wong is the name of a particular type of ransomware, so Cisco reps say they suspect that the group were likely planning on deploying ransomware, but had not actually gone that far before they got weeded out. Over at Google, employees are feeling a quote unquote real vibe change. At least according to one unnamed source who talked with Business Insider, Google has extended its hiring freeze, which began in late July and continues on today, and there are growing concerns that Google could initiate layoffs or institute tougher performance measures that employees will have to meet, and if they don't meet them, they might be considered for termination. Sindar pach I, the CEO of Google, has said that the company's head count and its productivity don't seem to match up, so essentially suggesting that Google has two many employees for the amount of work that's actually being done. So the worry is that the tougher performance measures could be a way to judge which employees are pulling more weight than others, and then the company might move to eliminate the employees who are seen to be falling behind. This kind of echoes something that met US CEO Mark Zuckerberg said a couple of months back about Meta, namely that quote there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here end quote. Now, in Meta's case, the strategy appears to be to turn up the pressure on employees and then see who sticks around. The idea being that the folks who aren't best suited for the company will drop off first. You know, if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen kind of thing. Now, personally, I don't think that's the best strategy because you could end up alienating some of your best employees who figure they can just go somewhere else and have be treated better. Right. That's getting increasingly difficult during these tough economic times. So maybe you could amble with that, but you can really end up with a lower head count without a guarantee that the people who stuck around are you know, the best ones. But what do I know? Anyway, We're seeing these sort of attitudes across the entire tech sector, particularly in these larger organizations. And you know, just as a rule, I have noticed that as organizations grow to gargantuan size, workload can end up spreading out over to a point where your average employee might not have that much actual work to do um And in fact, you see this with government agencies a lot, where some government employees spend most of their work days trying to look busy to justify the fact that they have a position. Now, to be clear, that is not the employee's fault. It's more of a sign of poor management and planning. And it just stinks when you realize that you've reached that point and then you have to make moves to correct course, because frequently that means you've got to let some folks go, and that's tough. On a similar note Microsoft is shutting down a department it first established in two thousand eighteen. The group is called the Modern Life Experiences Team, which I mean that name doesn't give you much of a hint about what the heck is going on over there, right Well, as it turns out, the role of the Modern Life Experiences Team was to win back professional consumers or pro sumers. So this was kind of a customer retention group, although more than retention, because retention just sounds like you're trying to keep folks there. Their job was to convince folks who had actively moved away from Microsoft products and services to come back into the fold. Anyway, the group consists of around two people, and those folks now are being told they have to find another position within Microsoft, so they can apply to work somewhere else within the company, or they can leave and take severance and at least they're gonna get several so that's something. So this isn't a case of Microsoft turning up the heat to try and get people to jump ship, because if they did that, then you know, people who are leaving they might not be qualified to get a severance package if they're leaving on their own. So that's something. It's a pretty tarnished silver lining, but it's better than nothing. You know. There's been a ton of business news lately because all the big public companies have been holding their various earnings calls for the end of a quarter. Most of them it's Q two, for some it might be Q three. It all depends on where they're their UH fiscal year starts, because it doesn't always start at the same time as the calendar year. And we've learned a lot of things in this process. We learned like how Warner Brothers Discovery merger has led to the superhero film bat Girl being shelved permanently. Reportedly, David Zaslov, who's the CEO of this merged company, felt that bat Girl was more valuable as a hacks right off than as a film, since it was destined really to just go to streaming rather than a theatrical release, and reportedly it would need more money to finish the film, and it had already gone over its initial million dollar budget up to ninety million, and so I guess the call was made that rather than pour more money into it, they could just write it off. Now, the story goes that the company only will receive the tax right off if bat Girl never gets a commercial release in any form, streaming or otherwise. If that's true, that means there's no hope for folks to ever see this movie unless the footage got leaked somehow. And there are a lot of people who are curious about it, some because they love the character back Girl, some because Michael Keaton is supposed to be in the movie as Batman, and of course he was Batman in the early nineties with the Tim Burton films, the the to that Tim Burton directed. So they're been a lot of curiosity about this movie, but it sounds like there's no chance of anyone actually seeing it, and it's caused a lot of folks to get angry. And obviously the filmmakers and the people involved in the project are disappointed. No one wants to work on something only to be told that work is never going to be seen. And let me tell you has someone who has once worked for David Zaslov. Though I was way way, way, way way under his radar, I can understand getting a little miffed at some of Zaslov's decisions. I got miffed at some of his decisions back when I was working for Discovery Communications. Zaslov has said that the plan is to cut around three billion dollars of costs out from this merged company, and he says that that might actually be on the conservative side, and that has a lot of folks worried. I can actually right now think of an entire company, a content company that could be on the chopping block. I would think the most likely fate for it would be to have gets sold off to some other entity, but it's too early to make any actual predictions. Zaslov has also indicated that it makes no economic sense to make high cost content for streaming platforms because you don't get a very big return on that investment. It ends up costing you more than you can make. And this is something that we see echoed on other streaming platforms, including on Netflix. And it's really no secret. I mean, everyone knew that Netflix was pouring truckloads of money into producing content in an effort to attract subscribers, and once those subscriber numbers began flagging a bit, investors got really worried. And we'll talk about other streaming services that have also had to reckon with the high cost of doing business after we come back from the break. Meanwhile, zas Lov has indicated that expensive productions really should just be targeted toward theatrical release, where a healthy box office could produce a good return. How to make streaming work from a profitability standpoint is a high priority because cable and satellite TV subscription numbers continue to drop, particularly here in the United States, and Zaslav is a cable guy through and through. That's the world he comes from, and that means he has to find a new model before the old one goes completely belly up. While he didn't go into detail, the general takeaway is that this new company, Warner Brothers Discovery, is going to combine HBO Max within the Discovery Plus streaming service or perhaps create a new merged one have a unified streaming service with different verticals or channels of content. So HBO Max isn't gonna go away. In fact, Zaslav called it the crown Jewel, but it will be incorporated into something bigger. At least that's the assumption right now, and also that there are expected layoffs coming from across both Discovery and Warner Brothers units in the not too distant future. We've got a lot more to talk about today. Before we get to it, let's take a quick break. Okay, we're back. Let's talk about Disney, because Disney also held an earnings call recently, and there's tons we could talk about there, but I'm really gonna look more at streaming services. Disney subscriber numbers for its digital streaming services totaled two one million people. That means, for the first time, a streaming service or collection of them really has posted higher subscriber numbers than Netflix. Netflix is behind Disney's services by about five hundred thousand subscribers total. But you heard the caveat there. This is not a single streaming service from Disney we're talking about. It's a collection of them. So Disney achieved this by having multiple streaming services. Netflix is just Netflix, but at Disney you've got Disney Plus, ESPN Plus, and Hulu. Now, out of those three, Disney Plus as the greatest number of subscribers at a hundred fifty two million. So if we break it down by service, Netflix is still way ahead. It's ahead of even Disney Plus. But it's not all good news anyway, and at least not to customers, because the rising costs of production. You know, those Marvel series ain't cheap, even if snarky folks do poke fun at the c g I at times. That means that Disney is going to pass those costs down to you, the viewer. Yep, a Disney Plus subscription is going to get more expensive starting December eight. Right now, a basic subscription costs seven dollars nine cents per month here in the US, and on December eight, that's going to increase to ten dollars and nine cents per month, which is a thirty eight percent increase. But hey, if you want, you could just stick with seven dollars cents a month, because Disney is introducing a tier at that price that will be including commercials, so it's ads supported, So if you don't mind ads in your programming, you can just keep paying what you're paying right now, you know, for an ad free experience. So in a way you get extra content because you get commercials too. Starting to sound like as lot who lose prices also going up. The ads supported tier will go from six dollars cents to seven dollars nine cents per month, and the ad free version will go from twelve to four that is effective October tenth. Disney previously had already announced that ESPN plus rates would increase by so they're all going up. I'm definitely grumpy about this, you know, just to keep it in the Disney family. But at the same time, it's kind of hard to protest this move. I mean, Disney's numbers reveal that the streaming divisions have been losing money collectively across all three platforms. They have lost one point one billion dollars in this most recent quarter. That's more than three million dollars over what analysts had predicted, and it shows that these services have really gone all out in an effort to attract subscribers by funding this very expensive programming that's on the services. Unfortunately, the number of incoming subscribers is not offsetting the investment being made to get them in the first place. So that only opens up a few options. Right, You could scale way back on production, which is what Zaslov is doing over at Warner Brothers Discovery, or you could hike up prices to your customers, which is what we're seeing at Disney. Or you might do a combination of both. This may mean that we will eventually enter into an era of fewer prestige productions for streaming platforms that the business just won't support it. And that's gonna be rough for creators and for audiences, but it might also be necessary. The balance of art and commerce is never an easy one, and often we'll see the scales tipe direction or the other, and then things will eventually level out, and then we typically started up all over again. Under the Trump administration, the Federal Communications Commission held an auction for companies to win a bid that would give them a portion of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, and that funds purpose is to provide money for Internet service providers to extend connectivity service to unserved and underserved communities, primarily rural communities that have limited or no access to Internet service providers. As it stands, one company that one a bid was Starlink, the space X unit that uses a network of tiny satellites to provide Internet connectivity to customers. But now the FCC has effectively changed its mind now. To be fair, the FCC changes dramatically from one presidential administration to the next, and it's a very different organization under Biden than it was under Trump. The f C C has now rejected Starlinks bid, which would have seen the unit of SpaceX received more than eight hundred eighty million dollars in government aid to flesh out its broadband offerings. So why the change of mind, Well, the FCC chair Jessica Rosenworzel said that Starlink wasn't really a proven entity and that's relying on quote developing technology end quote, meaning that the company cannot assure the f c C that it will live up to its part of the deal. Specifically, she said, quote, we cannot afford to subsidize ventures that are not delivering the promise speeds or are not likely to meet program requirements end quote. She also pointed out that starlinks model requires customers to purchase a six hundred dollar dish that definitely prices out a large number of households. And if your goal is to extend internet connectivity to unserved or underserved communities, part of that usually includes making sure that the solutions are going to be affordable to lower income households. It would be a bad look, as they say, to subsidize a company that had a really high initial price for customers, and that's before you start factoring in things like monthly service fees. The FCC also denied a bid from a company called lt D Broadband, which had won a one point three billion dollar bid back in the reason for the fccs rejection of that bid was that lt D failed to receive eligible telecommunications carrier status in seven of the fifteen states where it bid, and the FCC determined that lt D would be unable to actually deploy a network on the scale that the winning bids had been based upon. As the FCC pointed out, there is a limited amount of government money set aside to help extend broadband access, and so it's of chief importance that what little money there is be spent effectively. Though how you do that in the country where there are so few viable options for I sp S is beyond me. And that's all the news I have for today, Thursday, August eleven two. I hope that you are all well. Reach out to me if you have any suggestions for future topics on tech Stuff, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Yes, tex 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,