Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for the week ending on Friday, April twelfth, twenty twenty four. First up, Sam Bankman Freed aka SBF has filed an appeal for his recent conviction and sentencing, So quick recap. SBF was co founder of a couple of cryptocurrency firms, namely FTX, which was a cryptocurrency exchange, and Alimator Research, which was a crypto hedge fund. And a couple of years ago, some folks noticed that something hinky seemed to be going on at FTX, and it turned out that the company was using customer funds to cover bets that had been made by Alimator Research. If you're one put a kind of like high level view of this. Ultimately, the whole house of cards came crashing down and billions of dollars were lost or stolen. So SBF argued he was without blame, even as his various friends and peers and employees were pleading guilty to fraud charges and saying that SBF was totally to blame. So SBF ultimately was found guilty, he received a sentence for twenty five years for his crimes, and now he's appealing both the ruling and the sentencing. So will that appeal succeed? Now? Personally, I have my doubts. I am no legal expert, I'm not a lawyer or anything like that, but I doubt it simply because SBF didn't exactly conduct himself very well throughout the whole investigation and trial process to begin with, and allegedly engaged in acts of witness intimidation and witness tampering, among other things. That kind of stuff does not tend to go so well in the court system. But we'll just have to wait and see. US Senator Maria Cantwell recently said that the US government might give Byte Dance a little more time to divest itself of TikTok, or at the very least, she's in favor of such an extension. The original plan if the bill were to become law. More on that in just a moment, was that Byte Dance would have about six months to divest itself of TikTok. But now Contwell says she thinks the deadline of one year would better ensure success. Now, the cynical among us might also point out that extending the deadline into twenty twenty five would push things after elections here in the United States, and that maybe this is more about an attempt to avoid, you know, voters holding politicians accountable for their votes. But all this might be moot because while the US House of Representatives voted in favor of this measure, the US Senate, which is the other half of Congress here in the United States, has yet to take up the matter, and there's no guarantee that they will even vote on the bill, although Chuck Schumer has indicated that that's at least a possibility. If they do vote on the bill, there's no guarantee that the whole bill's going to pass into law. The public response to the House that might just be enough to convince senators that they would rather not touch this particular topic because it appears to have some prickly political consequences. Okay, I got a couple of Apples stories for y'all. First up, the company had a setback in UK courts today. Apple had petitioned the court to throw out a mass lawsuit brought against the company by more than fifteen hundred app developers. The court has denied Apple's request. The lawsuit will be allowed to go forward, and it alleges that Apple's policy to take a hefty percentage of transaction fees, up to thirty percent of transaction fees in some cases, is inherently unfair, and that Apple policies meant that the iOS store was really the only game in town. You couldn't have apps on like an Independence store, at least not in anywhere besides the European Union at this point. And it meant that in order to make your apps available to iOS users in the first place, you had to play by Apple's rules. It was the only game in town. There were no other alternatives. To be clear, Apple hasn't won or lost this court battle yet, It just failed to get the case dismissed. But considering the current regulatory attitude toward big tech, I imagine Apple is considering its various options right now. I personally would not be surprised if some sort of settlement follows in the future. If Apple is unable to get this case thrown out, Bloomberg apparently reports that Apple has a Mac computer refresh coming up that will introduce some pretty big changes for the line of computers. Now, I say Bloomberg apparently reports because I do not have a subscription to Bloomberg, so I'm actually pulling this information from an article in The Verge by Emma Roth, who goes on to actually cite that Bloomberg article. So this is like third hand once you hear it from me. Anyway, the new computers will have Apple's M four processor, and that hasn't even really gone into production yet, but the buzzword for M four is that these chips are optimized for processing AI Apple locations, because AI is the new black, y'all, and to be fair, AI processing does require an awful lot of oomph. It takes up tons of processing power in order to get AI to work properly. And Roth points out that Apple's sales in the macline have kind of slowed down in recent years, so maybe this is what the company is hoping will kind of inject new life in those sales. And I think I say this nearly every week, but I feel like part of the reason why Mac sales have declined is the same reason why sales for lots of high end products have declined in recent times. You had that whole economic uncertainty thing, you know, just hovering above us. You had rising interest rates, you had crazy inflation out there, and folks just decided that they would rather make do with what they have rather than shell out big bucks for new items, which I think is totally understandable. In fact, according to nerd wallet dot com, inflation in the United States for consumer prices, this isn't inflation in general, it's just consumer prices rows nearly twenty percent since January twenty twenty, So in those years, like, you're paying twenty percent more, almost twenty percent more for consumer goods, particularly high end goods. And it's pretty hard to convince people to push through barriers like that when you still also have iterative generational improvements in the tech itself, Like, unless the tech is unbelievably impressive, it's pretty hard to convince someone, hey, do you want to spend a lot of money for a computer that's a little bit better? And you know, when your business depends upon selling more hardware every year, which that's one big part of Apple's business. Although they're app's businesses kind of eclipse that, but it means you're in a tough spot, right, Like, how do you keep selling hardware when economic factors are disincentivizing customers from purchasing stuff. It's particularly tough for Apple because obviously Apple has long been associated as being sort of a premium brand. But we'll have to wait to learn more about the company's plans a little later this year. They're going to have their Worldwide Developer Conference in the summer and in the falls, typically when we get a big announcement about things like, you know, their iPhone strategy and stuff. So we'll probably learn more about these planned Mac refreshes as the year goes on. Michael Krider of PC World as an article titled ew co Pilot AI might auto launch with Windows eleven soon, And you may have gathered that Michael is not a big fan of this idea. I don't blame him. I'm not either, And he reports that Microsoft's Copilot AI, which is a generative AI tool, could auto start on Windows eleven machines in the not too distant future. So Michael is citing a report by MS power User that says Microsoft has the feature turned on in a recent Windows eleven Insider build. The Windows eleven Insider is kind of like a test kitchen for Microsoft features. They can roll it out and see how they do, and then tweak them or sometimes just can them entirely before potentially rolling them out to a broader public. So apparently the auto start feature will depend at least to some extent upon hardware. So if the user has a machine that has a display this smaller than twenty seven inches, it's not going to initiate an auto start. So that pretty much means that if you have a laptop, this is not going to be a factor, even if you're running Windows eleven. So that's something at least. And you can actually choose which programs do auto start by using the Windows Task Manager menu. You can go in there and set that, which reminds me, I need to do that on my personal machine because the number of programs that are auto launching at this point is starting to reach ludicrous levels and I just like close them out when they pop up, and I should just turn off the auto start thing in the first place. So memo to myself. Meta has introduced or will be introducing new protective measures for younger Instagram users. The company has created a default setting for users under the age of eighteen that's meant to detect and to blur out images that include nudity. Adults will also have the option of turning this feature on. It just won't be on by default for them, and it might be a nice change of pace for some of y'all out there. I would know not on Instagram, I don't have this problem. So the feature will give users actually the option to see the blurred image, like you can click see image and see the full unblurred version. But in order to do that, you have to make the conscious choice to do so, and Meta will also include warnings to let you know that you don't need to respond to such messages don't You shouldn't feel pressured to do so. The real concern here is sextortion, right, using these images to try and extort things out of the recipient, and Meta's taking a lot of efforts to try and push back against that. Obviously, the company has been under scrutiny and criticism for this kind of thing in the past about allowing it to happen, so this I think is a correction for that. To learn more about the measures that Meta is taking and the process it's using. You should check out the article Instagram to blur out nude images sent to teens and dms. It's by Todd Spangler and you can find that in variety of all places. All Right, we've got several more news stories to go through, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. Okay, we're back. So Russian software companies are having a pretty rough go of it in recent years. Y'all. You got the Russian government, which can get pretty darn involved in companies within the country, and that has led to some issues there, including companies choosing to discontinue certain services within Russia itself for fear of running a foul of Russian law. But now you've also got the United States, which is reportedly preparing to ban US citizens and companies from using products from the Russian company Kaspersky Labs. Now that name might sound familiar to so a lot of y'all out there. Kaspersky Labs is a huge name in cybersecurity. They are really important in cybersecurity. But now US officials are concerned that Kasperski Labs software could weaken national security. And it's not that different from the fear that TikTok could be an information collection tool for the Chinese Communist Party in China. So already US policy forbids federal agencies from using Kasperski Lab products. You're not supposed to install any of those on any federal owned hardware, So this potential measure would actually have a much more broad scope and expand that to US companies and citizens in general. It's unclear how this would actually be enforced, or if it would be enforced at least in every case. I mean, if you're running a modest business that has no connection to national security and you rely on one or more Kaspersky Labs products, it might be a bit extreme to force you to disengage those products from your business practices and either find replacements or just do without. Anyway, According to CNN, the matter isn't fully fleshed out yet and it may change, so we should know that in a few days. Either way, it's time to throw another Google product on top of the pile of corpses of other former Google products that no longer exist, or at least it will be that time pretty soon. And that's because Google is discontinuing its Google one VPN service. So Google one is Google's consumer cloud storage service. Your standard Google account comes with I think fifteen gigabytes of storage across multiple services like Gmail and Google Docs. It shares that fifteen gigabytes across all those different products. Google One can expand this to like one hundred gigabytes or beyond, depending upon the tier of service you choose. One benefit of being a Google one customer at least has been the use of a VPN service, but apparently not many people are actually using the virtual private network that Google offered, so Google said that was one of the reasons the company was choosing to discontinue the feature. The other one is that it would allow people who had been supporting the VPN to get freed up to work on features that you know people are actively using. But for those few customers out there who did make use of the VPN by Google One service, they'll get prompts suggesting alternative third party solutions that they can use instead. Or if you have a Pixel seven or later, then you'll still be able to use Google's VPN, So I guess some folks will continue to have access to it. And now for some muskie news. First up, Ours Technica's John BROADCN has a fun piece titled Elon Musk's x botched, an attempt to replace Twitter dot com links with x dot com. So here's what happened. So, at least for folks who are using the iOS app version of Twitter, that's where these changes rolled out. The service would automatically find and replace instances of Twitter dot com and they would replace it with x dot com. But that find and replaced feature was really rudimentary when it first rolled out. It wouldn't search for just Twitter dot com. It would look for any URL that would then end in Twitter dot com. So, in an example that Broadkin gives in the article, you could create a URL like netfliit Twitter dot com, like netfli Twitter dot com, and the find and replaced feature would take the Twitter dot com part of that URL and change it to x dot com. So then your link would appear as Netflix dot com and it would look like it was an official Netflix dot com link. But if you clicked on it, you wouldn't go to Netflix dot com. You would go to netfliit Twitter dot com. So, in other words, it was possible for someone to create like a phishing site and spoof it to look like something else and use that to you know, farm things like usernames and passwords and stuff, or to pass along malware all sorts of different militia ways, or just you know, mischievous ways. In some cases, like you could just redirect people to something that they probably would rather not have seen. And this only works with URLs, where the final letter in the second level domain would be X, right, like Netflix. It works for that because that's how Netflix ends is with an X. Wouldn't work so great for like Facebook, right, it would be facebooks. So the issue was active long enough for a bunch of enterprising folks to register various domains for all sorts of shenanigans. But thankfully Twitter slash X has now corrected the utter replace feature so it doesn't do that anymore. But yeah, that was a big old whip scene. I'm Rita Khalid of The Verge reports that X is also taking away the ability for premium users to hide their shame I'm sorry, I mean hide their blue check marks. So you might remember that once upon a time, the check mark on Twitter marked a verified account, So these accounts typically belonged to people of some note for some reason I was also included. I don't know how I qualified, And it really was just to tell users that, yes, this Twitter account actually does belong to the legitimate person who claims it. It is verified. That is who you're talking to. It's not someone impersonating this figure. But then Musk turned the checkmark into a designation for people who paid to become premium members, and suddenly the social cachet of the check mark went up in smoke and it became kind of like an albatross. So some folks felt that having that check mark was a badge of dishonor and they would rather people not know that they had paid to become premium members or had been designated premium members because they just had enough followers. Because Elon Musk did turn some of those really popular Twitter accounts into premium accounts without them having subscribed. But now bad news. You know, it used to be that you could hide that check mark if you winto settings, but that's getting removed. Why is X removing the ability to hide those check marks. That's a mystery. Maybe it's an attempt to flex by saying, hey, look how many of our users are premium subscribers. You know, these are people who are willing to pay for services. So maybe some of you advertisers would really like to come back and tap into that market pretty please. I don't know, I'm just spitballing here. For certain accounts that have lots of followers, they get the premium upgrade for free, like I mentioned, So it's not exactly verification. I guess it's more like validation maybe, depending on whether you think the check mark is a good or bad thing. Now to talk about a different Muskie company, that of Tesla. Elon Musk announced last week to expect a Tesla robotaxi something or other announced on August eighth of this year. Now, the exact nature of this robotaxi product is still not really clear yet. I think most folks are assuming that Tesla's going to launch some sort of robot taxi service, and that might be the plan. But according to NBC News, as David Ingram, agencies in California, Arizona, and Nevada, which are three states that have specific permit requirements for robotaxi services, none of them have yet received any kind of notice from Tesla to initiate the permit process. Now it's possible whatever Musk has in mind isn't intended for any of those states, though if you're excluding California, that's a bit wild. Considering that state has such a huge population. It would be weird to purposefully cut that market out. So we have ourselves a bit of a mystery. What could this robotaxi announcement be if Tesla isn't actually applying for these permits now? The process for Nevada is apparently pretty straightforward and quick, so maybe that's still coming and it'll be fine. California's process is not so fast, and the state has put a lot of pressure on robotaxi services recently due to some notable accidents and glitches in the past. So could this just be another case of Elon Musk making a statement or promise without really having the goods to back it up. I don't know. I guess we'll find out in August. All right, before I sign off, I've got two pieces to recommend to you all today. First up is a piece by David Klepper of AP News titled A Congressman wants to understand AI. So he went back to a college classroom to learn And yes, it's about a US congressman who, in fact, in an effort to expand his understanding of AI, has enrolled in computer science classes in college. And I think that's a great approach. We often talk about how those who are in charge of creating laws are often out of touch when it comes to areas that tend to evolve very quickly, such as the case with tech, and next, I recommend the piece titled Welcome to the Golden Age of User Hostility by Charlie Warzel for The Atlantic. Warzel explores how technology and connectivity have transformed the consumer experience in ways that are often very much not good. And Warzel touches on many things, including the story about Roku changing its terms of service, which we covered recently in an episode about ULA's. But Warzel's piece goes beyond that kind of stuff, so I recommend you check that out. That's it for the news this week. I hope that you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for the week ending on Friday, April twelfth, twenty twenty four. First up, Sam Bankman Freed aka SBF has filed an appeal for his recent conviction and sentencing, So quick recap. SBF was co founder of a couple of cryptocurrency firms, namely FTX, which was a cryptocurrency exchange, and Alimator Research, which was a crypto hedge fund. And a couple of years ago, some folks noticed that something hinky seemed to be going on at FTX, and it turned out that the company was using customer funds to cover bets that had been made by Alimator Research. If you're one put a kind of like high level view of this. Ultimately, the whole house of cards came crashing down and billions of dollars were lost or stolen. So SBF argued he was without blame, even as his various friends and peers and employees were pleading guilty to fraud charges and saying that SBF was totally to blame. So SBF ultimately was found guilty, he received a sentence for twenty five years for his crimes, and now he's appealing both the ruling and the sentencing. So will that appeal succeed? Now? Personally, I have my doubts. I am no legal expert, I'm not a lawyer or anything like that, but I doubt it simply because SBF didn't exactly conduct himself very well throughout the whole investigation and trial process to begin with, and allegedly engaged in acts of witness intimidation and witness tampering, among other things. That kind of stuff does not tend to go so well in the court system. But we'll just have to wait and see. US Senator Maria Cantwell recently said that the US government might give Byte Dance a little more time to divest itself of TikTok, or at the very least, she's in favor of such an extension. The original plan if the bill were to become law. More on that in just a moment, was that Byte Dance would have about six months to divest itself of TikTok. But now Contwell says she thinks the deadline of one year would better ensure success. Now, the cynical among us might also point out that extending the deadline into twenty twenty five would push things after elections here in the United States, and that maybe this is more about an attempt to avoid, you know, voters holding politicians accountable for their votes. But all this might be moot because while the US House of Representatives voted in favor of this measure, the US Senate, which is the other half of Congress here in the United States, has yet to take up the matter, and there's no guarantee that they will even vote on the bill, although Chuck Schumer has indicated that that's at least a possibility. If they do vote on the bill, there's no guarantee that the whole bill's going to pass into law. The public response to the House that might just be enough to convince senators that they would rather not touch this particular topic because it appears to have some prickly political consequences. Okay, I got a couple of Apples stories for y'all. First up, the company had a setback in UK courts today. Apple had petitioned the court to throw out a mass lawsuit brought against the company by more than fifteen hundred app developers. The court has denied Apple's request. The lawsuit will be allowed to go forward, and it alleges that Apple's policy to take a hefty percentage of transaction fees, up to thirty percent of transaction fees in some cases, is inherently unfair, and that Apple policies meant that the iOS store was really the only game in town. You couldn't have apps on like an Independence store, at least not in anywhere besides the European Union at this point. And it meant that in order to make your apps available to iOS users in the first place, you had to play by Apple's rules. It was the only game in town. There were no other alternatives. To be clear, Apple hasn't won or lost this court battle yet, It just failed to get the case dismissed. But considering the current regulatory attitude toward big tech, I imagine Apple is considering its various options right now. I personally would not be surprised if some sort of settlement follows in the future. If Apple is unable to get this case thrown out, Bloomberg apparently reports that Apple has a Mac computer refresh coming up that will introduce some pretty big changes for the line of computers. Now, I say Bloomberg apparently reports because I do not have a subscription to Bloomberg, so I'm actually pulling this information from an article in The Verge by Emma Roth, who goes on to actually cite that Bloomberg article. So this is like third hand once you hear it from me. Anyway, the new computers will have Apple's M four processor, and that hasn't even really gone into production yet, but the buzzword for M four is that these chips are optimized for processing AI Apple locations, because AI is the new black, y'all, and to be fair, AI processing does require an awful lot of oomph. It takes up tons of processing power in order to get AI to work properly. And Roth points out that Apple's sales in the macline have kind of slowed down in recent years, so maybe this is what the company is hoping will kind of inject new life in those sales. And I think I say this nearly every week, but I feel like part of the reason why Mac sales have declined is the same reason why sales for lots of high end products have declined in recent times. You had that whole economic uncertainty thing, you know, just hovering above us. You had rising interest rates, you had crazy inflation out there, and folks just decided that they would rather make do with what they have rather than shell out big bucks for new items, which I think is totally understandable. In fact, according to nerd wallet dot com, inflation in the United States for consumer prices, this isn't inflation in general, it's just consumer prices rows nearly twenty percent since January twenty twenty, So in those years, like, you're paying twenty percent more, almost twenty percent more for consumer goods, particularly high end goods. And it's pretty hard to convince people to push through barriers like that when you still also have iterative generational improvements in the tech itself, Like, unless the tech is unbelievably impressive, it's pretty hard to convince someone, hey, do you want to spend a lot of money for a computer that's a little bit better? And you know, when your business depends upon selling more hardware every year, which that's one big part of Apple's business. Although they're app's businesses kind of eclipse that, but it means you're in a tough spot, right, Like, how do you keep selling hardware when economic factors are disincentivizing customers from purchasing stuff. It's particularly tough for Apple because obviously Apple has long been associated as being sort of a premium brand. But we'll have to wait to learn more about the company's plans a little later this year. They're going to have their Worldwide Developer Conference in the summer and in the falls, typically when we get a big announcement about things like, you know, their iPhone strategy and stuff. So we'll probably learn more about these planned Mac refreshes as the year goes on. Michael Krider of PC World as an article titled ew co Pilot AI might auto launch with Windows eleven soon, And you may have gathered that Michael is not a big fan of this idea. I don't blame him. I'm not either, And he reports that Microsoft's Copilot AI, which is a generative AI tool, could auto start on Windows eleven machines in the not too distant future. So Michael is citing a report by MS power User that says Microsoft has the feature turned on in a recent Windows eleven Insider build. The Windows eleven Insider is kind of like a test kitchen for Microsoft features. They can roll it out and see how they do, and then tweak them or sometimes just can them entirely before potentially rolling them out to a broader public. So apparently the auto start feature will depend at least to some extent upon hardware. So if the user has a machine that has a display this smaller than twenty seven inches, it's not going to initiate an auto start. So that pretty much means that if you have a laptop, this is not going to be a factor, even if you're running Windows eleven. So that's something at least. And you can actually choose which programs do auto start by using the Windows Task Manager menu. You can go in there and set that, which reminds me, I need to do that on my personal machine because the number of programs that are auto launching at this point is starting to reach ludicrous levels and I just like close them out when they pop up, and I should just turn off the auto start thing in the first place. So memo to myself. Meta has introduced or will be introducing new protective measures for younger Instagram users. The company has created a default setting for users under the age of eighteen that's meant to detect and to blur out images that include nudity. Adults will also have the option of turning this feature on. It just won't be on by default for them, and it might be a nice change of pace for some of y'all out there. I would know not on Instagram, I don't have this problem. So the feature will give users actually the option to see the blurred image, like you can click see image and see the full unblurred version. But in order to do that, you have to make the conscious choice to do so, and Meta will also include warnings to let you know that you don't need to respond to such messages don't You shouldn't feel pressured to do so. The real concern here is sextortion, right, using these images to try and extort things out of the recipient, and Meta's taking a lot of efforts to try and push back against that. Obviously, the company has been under scrutiny and criticism for this kind of thing in the past about allowing it to happen, so this I think is a correction for that. To learn more about the measures that Meta is taking and the process it's using. You should check out the article Instagram to blur out nude images sent to teens and dms. It's by Todd Spangler and you can find that in variety of all places. All Right, we've got several more news stories to go through, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. Okay, we're back. So Russian software companies are having a pretty rough go of it in recent years. Y'all. You got the Russian government, which can get pretty darn involved in companies within the country, and that has led to some issues there, including companies choosing to discontinue certain services within Russia itself for fear of running a foul of Russian law. But now you've also got the United States, which is reportedly preparing to ban US citizens and companies from using products from the Russian company Kaspersky Labs. Now that name might sound familiar to so a lot of y'all out there. Kaspersky Labs is a huge name in cybersecurity. They are really important in cybersecurity. But now US officials are concerned that Kasperski Labs software could weaken national security. And it's not that different from the fear that TikTok could be an information collection tool for the Chinese Communist Party in China. So already US policy forbids federal agencies from using Kasperski Lab products. You're not supposed to install any of those on any federal owned hardware, So this potential measure would actually have a much more broad scope and expand that to US companies and citizens in general. It's unclear how this would actually be enforced, or if it would be enforced at least in every case. I mean, if you're running a modest business that has no connection to national security and you rely on one or more Kaspersky Labs products, it might be a bit extreme to force you to disengage those products from your business practices and either find replacements or just do without. Anyway, According to CNN, the matter isn't fully fleshed out yet and it may change, so we should know that in a few days. Either way, it's time to throw another Google product on top of the pile of corpses of other former Google products that no longer exist, or at least it will be that time pretty soon. And that's because Google is discontinuing its Google one VPN service. So Google one is Google's consumer cloud storage service. Your standard Google account comes with I think fifteen gigabytes of storage across multiple services like Gmail and Google Docs. It shares that fifteen gigabytes across all those different products. Google One can expand this to like one hundred gigabytes or beyond, depending upon the tier of service you choose. One benefit of being a Google one customer at least has been the use of a VPN service, but apparently not many people are actually using the virtual private network that Google offered, so Google said that was one of the reasons the company was choosing to discontinue the feature. The other one is that it would allow people who had been supporting the VPN to get freed up to work on features that you know people are actively using. But for those few customers out there who did make use of the VPN by Google One service, they'll get prompts suggesting alternative third party solutions that they can use instead. Or if you have a Pixel seven or later, then you'll still be able to use Google's VPN, So I guess some folks will continue to have access to it. And now for some muskie news. First up, Ours Technica's John BROADCN has a fun piece titled Elon Musk's x botched, an attempt to replace Twitter dot com links with x dot com. So here's what happened. So, at least for folks who are using the iOS app version of Twitter, that's where these changes rolled out. The service would automatically find and replace instances of Twitter dot com and they would replace it with x dot com. But that find and replaced feature was really rudimentary when it first rolled out. It wouldn't search for just Twitter dot com. It would look for any URL that would then end in Twitter dot com. So, in an example that Broadkin gives in the article, you could create a URL like netfliit Twitter dot com, like netfli Twitter dot com, and the find and replaced feature would take the Twitter dot com part of that URL and change it to x dot com. So then your link would appear as Netflix dot com and it would look like it was an official Netflix dot com link. But if you clicked on it, you wouldn't go to Netflix dot com. You would go to netfliit Twitter dot com. So, in other words, it was possible for someone to create like a phishing site and spoof it to look like something else and use that to you know, farm things like usernames and passwords and stuff, or to pass along malware all sorts of different militia ways, or just you know, mischievous ways. In some cases, like you could just redirect people to something that they probably would rather not have seen. And this only works with URLs, where the final letter in the second level domain would be X, right, like Netflix. It works for that because that's how Netflix ends is with an X. Wouldn't work so great for like Facebook, right, it would be facebooks. So the issue was active long enough for a bunch of enterprising folks to register various domains for all sorts of shenanigans. But thankfully Twitter slash X has now corrected the utter replace feature so it doesn't do that anymore. But yeah, that was a big old whip scene. I'm Rita Khalid of The Verge reports that X is also taking away the ability for premium users to hide their shame I'm sorry, I mean hide their blue check marks. So you might remember that once upon a time, the check mark on Twitter marked a verified account, So these accounts typically belonged to people of some note for some reason I was also included. I don't know how I qualified, And it really was just to tell users that, yes, this Twitter account actually does belong to the legitimate person who claims it. It is verified. That is who you're talking to. It's not someone impersonating this figure. But then Musk turned the checkmark into a designation for people who paid to become premium members, and suddenly the social cachet of the check mark went up in smoke and it became kind of like an albatross. So some folks felt that having that check mark was a badge of dishonor and they would rather people not know that they had paid to become premium members or had been designated premium members because they just had enough followers. Because Elon Musk did turn some of those really popular Twitter accounts into premium accounts without them having subscribed. But now bad news. You know, it used to be that you could hide that check mark if you winto settings, but that's getting removed. Why is X removing the ability to hide those check marks. That's a mystery. Maybe it's an attempt to flex by saying, hey, look how many of our users are premium subscribers. You know, these are people who are willing to pay for services. So maybe some of you advertisers would really like to come back and tap into that market pretty please. I don't know, I'm just spitballing here. For certain accounts that have lots of followers, they get the premium upgrade for free, like I mentioned, So it's not exactly verification. I guess it's more like validation maybe, depending on whether you think the check mark is a good or bad thing. Now to talk about a different Muskie company, that of Tesla. Elon Musk announced last week to expect a Tesla robotaxi something or other announced on August eighth of this year. Now, the exact nature of this robotaxi product is still not really clear yet. I think most folks are assuming that Tesla's going to launch some sort of robot taxi service, and that might be the plan. But according to NBC News, as David Ingram, agencies in California, Arizona, and Nevada, which are three states that have specific permit requirements for robotaxi services, none of them have yet received any kind of notice from Tesla to initiate the permit process. Now it's possible whatever Musk has in mind isn't intended for any of those states, though if you're excluding California, that's a bit wild. Considering that state has such a huge population. It would be weird to purposefully cut that market out. So we have ourselves a bit of a mystery. What could this robotaxi announcement be if Tesla isn't actually applying for these permits now? The process for Nevada is apparently pretty straightforward and quick, so maybe that's still coming and it'll be fine. California's process is not so fast, and the state has put a lot of pressure on robotaxi services recently due to some notable accidents and glitches in the past. So could this just be another case of Elon Musk making a statement or promise without really having the goods to back it up. I don't know. I guess we'll find out in August. All right, before I sign off, I've got two pieces to recommend to you all today. First up is a piece by David Klepper of AP News titled A Congressman wants to understand AI. So he went back to a college classroom to learn And yes, it's about a US congressman who, in fact, in an effort to expand his understanding of AI, has enrolled in computer science classes in college. And I think that's a great approach. We often talk about how those who are in charge of creating laws are often out of touch when it comes to areas that tend to evolve very quickly, such as the case with tech, and next, I recommend the piece titled Welcome to the Golden Age of User Hostility by Charlie Warzel for The Atlantic. Warzel explores how technology and connectivity have transformed the consumer experience in ways that are often very much not good. And Warzel touches on many things, including the story about Roku changing its terms of service, which we covered recently in an episode about ULA's. But Warzel's piece goes beyond that kind of stuff, so I recommend you check that out. That's it for the news this week. I hope that you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.