Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio. And how the tech are you? It is time for the tech news for Tuesday, January twenty five, twenty twenty two, and the first item is sort of a good news bad news situation. The bad news, at least if you're heavily invested in cryptocurrency, is that the value of various cryptocurrencies have really taken a serious hit over the last several weeks. It's been quite a time for bitcoin. Bitcoin saw its value peak to nearly seventy thousand dollars last year per bitcoin, So one bitcoin was worth nearly seventy grand at its height last year. But as I was writing this episode, it's around thirty six thousand dollars per bitcoin. Now, that's still a heck of a lot of money on a per bitcoin basis, obviously, right, particularly for those of you out there who were aware of cryptocurrency back when bitcoin's value was a fractions of a dollar, It is still a remarkable story. However, it means folks who invested when the cryptocurrency was at a higher value, are probably not too happy right now. Likewise, ethereum, which nearly reached five thousand dollars per unit earlier in the you know, last year, now it's currently at around dollars, so less than half of that. Now, keep in mind, at the beginning of twenty twenty, ethereum was actually below two thousand dollars per ether so it's still above where it was early twenty. So again, I don't want to paint the picture of saying crypto isn't worth anything. That's not the case. We're just seeing a massive drop off in value. Now. There are some people who are predicting that this could be the end of cryptocurrency. I think that that is way too dramatic a prediction. A lot of other folks, myself included, are saying we're probably looking at maybe a rough trend for a while. Uh. After all, the crypto market collectively has lost around a trillion dollars since that high point in bitcoin's history. But there are a lot of factors that are contributing to this all around the world. I'm not gonna make any predictions about what's gonna come next, because again, if you actually look at any chart that plots the value of major cryptocurrencies over time, you'll see that there are periods of wild growth and wild decline. And this is one of the reasons why I actually get down on cryptocurrency so much, because it's so volatile that it's not really an effective currency. It's more of a speculative investment. Anyway, that's the bad news. That crypto is down right now and it is probably in for a rough time in the near future. I suspect we'll see it recover, unless you know, things around the world developed to a point that really spelled doom for cryptocurrency, which could happen. But now let's talk about the good news. So Tom's Hardware reports that the price of GPUs, that is graphics processing units has come down for most models across eBay, and this is most likely linked to the decline in cryptocurrency value. So let me explain now, for bitcoin, GPUs aren't really in the picture, and that's because bitcoins value is so high that people have moved away from GPUs to more specialized processors and systems in order to get the competitive advantage over other Bitcoin miners. Remember to mind cryptocurrency in a proof of work model anyway means you're using computer systems to generate the right answer to what is the actually a math guessing game, and you want to do it first before anyone else does, so you need computer systems that generate guesses faster than anyone else's system does. With Bitcoin, GPUs just can't keep up with the much more expensive specialized hardware that's used by serious bitcoin mining organizations. But Ethereum is different. See Ethereum isn't worth as much as bitcoin is, so it wouldn't make economic sense to use that specialized bitcoin mining equipment for Ethereum because the equipment would cost more than what you would get out of mining the ethereum. So that is where folks typically are relying upon GPU cards for their mining rigs. It's in the Ethereum ecosystem, not the Bitcoin one. But with Ethereum's price falling, the demand for cards has changed, and that means that the price for cards has changed, at least on eBay. Uh it's still danged hard to find a graphics card on the primary market, like the the original points of sale, that is still very hard to do, and those cards there are pretty much holding their market value. So a lot of folks have to look to the secondary market for their equipment, like eBay. I should add that when I say the price has come down, it doesn't mean that the cards are now cheap. For example, the r t X, which is kind of the creme de la creme in the GPU space right now, it is going for around two thousand, five hundred fifty bucks on average for just the graphics card. Remember that's one component in a computer. You would actually have to build out the rest of your computer too. Now that is about a thousand fifty dollars above the cards M S r P. Meaning you know, you should be able to find the the actual card for dollars on the regular market. It's just that people have bought up all the cards and are trying to sell them for a markup on sizes like eBay. So it's still a heck of a markup, right, A thousand dollars, a thousand plus dollars, that's a heck of a markup. But Tom's Hardware points out that if we were to see cryptocurrency value decline further and as companies eliminate shortage issues in the supply chain, as we start to see those ease up, where the supply chain starts to get back into a good working order, then we should see prices in the secondary market continue to come down. In fact, we might even get to a point where people will stop buying up the cards in bulk and trying to sell them on eBay in the first place, because the profit margin will be too low to deal with the hassle. At least a gamer can dream. While we're talking about graphics cards and processors, let's revisit the story of Nvidios quest to acquire ARM, that is, the British chip designer company, or at least founded and operated in Britain, currently owned by a Japanese conglomerate called soft Bank. Well, we first learned of this and acquisition back in September of twenty twenty. It was announced it would be a forty billion dollar deal, and that deal made news around the world for lots of different reasons. There were people who were afraid that in Nvidia buying up ARM would consolidate the semiconductor industry and limit competition, and that would hurt customers down the line, whether those customers are you know, computer manufacturers or end users that you know. Consolidation and markets rarely benefits the end customer. It really benefits whomever is consolidating all the power, but not so much everybody else. And over in the UK, where ARM is based, there were worries that a foreign company America purchasing a British chip designer could open up the possibility of national security issues, ignoring the fact that soft Bank already owned ARM. But whatever, and CNBC now reports that in Video may be ready to abandon their f their f you know this this quest to purchase ARM that you know, regulatory bodies around the world are maybe putting up a little too much resistance and the company is kind of mired and all that and wants to extricate itself. CNBC also reports that soft Bank is preparing to launch an i p O, that is, initial public offering for ARM if this acquisition deal actually does fall through. So in that event, ARM would then spent off to become a publicly traded company on the market, and it would not be acquired by you know, in Vidio. The collapse of the deal would be a pretty big setback for Invidia. Uh and while in Video would no longer be obligated for that forty billion dollar deal, I imagine the company has already spent a healthy chunk of change and resources on the acquisition efforts to date. The news perhaps contributed to Invidious share price, which fell three in pre market trading today. The attorneys general for Washington, d C. And the states of Indiana, Texas, and Washington State are coming after Google. They have filed lawsuits against the company alleging that Google purposefully misled users from two thousand fourteen to two thousand nineteen with regard to location tracking. So the attorneys are saying that Google indicated if you, or at least implied that if you turned off your location history setting on a Android device, for example, that the company would no longer track your location and thus you wouldn't have to worry about them selling your location information to advertisers and the like. But the truth of the matter was that you would actually have to dive a little bit further into your settings and go to the Web and App activity section to turn off location tracking for real z s. So, in other words, it was like there were two switches. There was a more obvious switch labeled location history, but turning that off didn't actually turn off location tracking, and the switch that would turn off location tracking was a trickier one that did exist, but it wasn't as easy to find. It actually reminds me of a sequence in the novel and the radio play and the television series in the movie Hitchhecker's Guide to the Galaxy, where Arthur dent Uh, the protagonist of the series, was trying to seek out a a city Uh press release essentially, or a city order, and that it was purposefully kept in an in an almost inaccessible location to avoid people discovering it. Uh. Kind of similar to that, And the attorneys say that Google didn't really indicate to users that the web and app activity setting was even something they should know about until around two thousand eighteen. Now, the lawsuits that these attorneys general have filed are somewhat similar to one that the State of Arizona filed against Google back in twenty twenty, But the new lawsuit are targeting something that the attorneys general are calling dark patterns, and that's starting to sound a little bit like an epic fantasy, you know, perhaps a plot that used to do or the Wizard would oppose. But in this case, dark patterns really refer to choices made in user interface or UI design, and these are choices that would guide people down certain pathways and de emphasizing other pathways. So, in other words, it's a kind of UI design philosophy meant to provide all the options that you're obligated to provide because of various laws and regulations. Like if the law says you have to give users the option to turn this off, well, this UI design technically fulfills that obligation, but you kind of use like smoke and mirrors so that very few people actually take the effort to go down the correct pathway to find that setting and turn it off. You make it inconvenient, and you make other stuff far more accessible and easy to understand in an effort to try and discourage people from turning off this otherwise extremely lucrative setting. The lawsuit also has something that I've never seen before, which is that the attorneys general are demanding that Google ditch any algorithms that the company created with the money that was generated from leveraging this location data collected from users during that time frame. That's an addition to surrendering any money the Google made during that time from the use of location data. I don't think i've ever seen a case where lawyers were demanding a company surrender algorithms. I'll have to keep an eye on this story as it develops. I also wonder, you know, like, how would they hold Google accountable to determine exactly what money came from what sources and how much would have to be surrendered. It's a pretty complicated thing, and I don't know how it would all be resolved. I'm guessing that the ultimate goal is to force Google to make changes and perhaps pay out a settlement. But um, we'll have to wait and see. I I this one is beyond me. We have a couple more stories about Google, plus a whole lot of other tech news after we come back from this break. Okay, We've got a couple of other little Google news items to talk about before and move on. One is that the company announced it would soon block ad targeting for users under the age of eighteen. Specifically, a press release from Monday says quote, We've already made progress on delivering a safer experience to kids and teens online by expanding safeguards to prevent age sensitive ad categories from being shown to teens, and we block ad targeting based on the age gender or interests of people under eighteen end quote. I'm actually surprised that it took this long for enough pressure to mount against Google to a point where the company made this kind of release. But this is another example of how big tech companies are feeling a pushback from arious governments and agencies around the world. In Europe, obviously, there's been, uh for a while, a growing emphasis placed upon citizen privacy and security and that the companies have to give citizens enough information and options so that they can choose whether or not to have their data collected by various entities and in what context. And we're starting to see that kind of expand to other places in the world, including here in the United States. And obviously the the safety of children is always something that is considered pretty important for obvious reasons, and in recent years we've seen a lot more scrutiny dedicated to that, particularly towards Google, UH, with things like you know, the Google's YouTube algorithms being potentially harmful toward kids. We've also obviously seen it applied to other platform was like Facebook. UH. Now this is also not to say that Google is stopping its practice of pouring resources into developing new ways to track and categorize people now. Previously, Google developed a project that it called Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLOCK, which aimed to phase out tracking cookies for the purposes of gathering information about users as they navigate online. Cookies have had a pretty the controversial past as well. The whole idea behind cookies is that a browser is able to collect certain information through these cookies that remains relevant to that user, so that between browsing sessions, or even within a browsing session, things are smoothed over, right Like otherwise, you might have to log in and adjust your settings for a particular web service every single time you visit it, which is kind of a hass. But cookies can also be used to track your activity and be used in advertisements, so that like an advertiser knows that you were looking at, I don't know, uh, hiking boots, and so the next time you're on Facebook you just see like tons of ads for hiking boots because these cookies have tracked that activity and Facebook was able to leverage that and serve you ads based upon that. Well, now things are changing a little bit. See FLOCK was an idea that would instead lump users into groups of folks who have similar interests, so you would be in independent flocks based upon whatever you were showing interested in. Flock however, now is could put. Google now has a project called Topics, which doesn't sound that different to me. Topics is a project that would track a users activities across the web an attempt to infer what kind of stuff that user was interested in, and Topics will hold on to browsing data for sort of a rolling three week periods. Your last three weeks of browsing will be what determines which topics are tagged to you like, which ones you appear to be interested in. And they're starting off, I think with three topics, but could potentially expand that, and that would be handy information for advertisers, right They would look to see which users have specific topics tagged to them and those would be the ones that would be most relevant to those advertisers. So if an advertiser is looking for someone who like has been tagged as having an avid interest in outdoors the activities, well, they're likely not going to find me on that topics list, and I won't get targeted for those ads. Now, Topics will just be one of several signals that advertisers can select when they work with Google to serve ads to customers. They're not required to use topics, and users will have some control over this as well. You'll be able to view the list of topics that Google has determined your into, and then you can go and strike any off the list you would rather not see advertising four and for looks like yours, truly who I would do pretty much all of my research online. That would be handy for me, because I don't want to be served ads for say, cryptocurrency, all day every day. It's not really my bag. Okay, let's transition to some other stories in activism news. A group of hackers have infected the state run railway system in Belarus with ransomware and essentially locking down the computer systems of the railway system. The activists have said their ransom is that the President of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, must stop helping Russian forces as they amass in preparation for a potential invasion of Ukraine. Ukraine is south of Belarus. Belarus is between Russia and Ukraine, or at least partly that the borders are longer than that, but you get what I'm saying. And the hackers released a message that reads, in part quote, as part of the Peclo cyber campaign, we encrypted the bulk of the servers, databases, and workstations of the bell ZHD being the Belarus railway station or system in order to slow down and disrupt the operation of the road. The backups have been destroyed end quote. The group then goes on to say that the automated systems in this computer network have not been targeted because the group wished to avoid quote unquote emergency situations. In other words, they didn't want to completely cripple the system and deny the capability of responding to an emergency because that would obviously bring harm upon people. That seems pretty darn considerate considering we're talking about, you know, hackers. The activists have demanded the release of fifty political prisoners that are held in Belarus and whom they say are most in need of medical attention, and they also are seeking a commitment from the President of Belarus to resist Russian invasion forces or what they're what they believe to be Russian invasion forces in Israel. A law that would give judges within Israel immense power to force websites to remove content is back on the table after having been rejected back in TwixT. The law, which is casually referred to as the Facebook Law, would grant quote Israeli courts the power to demand the removal of user generated content on social media content platforms that can be perceived as inflammatory or as harming the security of the state or the security of people, or the security of the public. End quote. That's some pretty vague wording. Now, in practice, we tend to see these kinds of policies specifically target Palestinians, especially Palestinians who wish to hold Israel's government accountable for alleged human rights violations, for uh aggress of actions against the Palestinian people, for lots of issues surrounding those aspects of life in Israel and around Palestine, and Israel's right wing government officials have a history of of censoring Palestinian voices. Ramsey Borrowed, a journalist and author, has a detailed post about this law, its history, and what is intended to do in an article titled quote how Israel's Facebook Law plans to control all Palestinian content online? End quote, and Burud points out that the law, while referred to as Facebook Law, would reach far beyond social networking sites to potentially any website at all, and warns that should websites comply with this, it would set a dangerous precedent. That's that's assuming that the law is passed as written, but also that you know, if companies actually agree to it. The article is a very good read. I recommend you seek it out. All right, We've got a few more stories to cover before we wrap up this news episode. But before we get to that, let's take another quick break. In Myanmar, the military, which effectively rules the nation after a military coup from last year, is preparing to pass a cybersecurity law that would make it illegal for citizens to use virtual private networks, or VPNs. The regime has previously banned the uses of social networking services like Facebook and Twitter after the military coup, but people in Myanmar can still access those services if they use a VPN. You log into the VPN, the VPN then logs into the service and it's a work around. But now the military wants to outlaw VPNs and close that loophole. This is yet another move by the military to control the population of the n bar. In fact, last month, the regime doubled the amount of tax that the government places on mobile internet data, so they're really trying to crack down on citizens abilities to communicate with one another and to communicate ideas that are in opposition to the military regime. The law goes much further than just banning VPNs, however, it essentially grants the government unlimited rights to access citizens data and to ban any content that the regime objects to. In fact, just reading over reports about this law makes the Great Firewall of China seem tamed by comparison, at least to me. Activists around the world are raising alarm, with many saying that the regime should have no power to draft and enact laws because it's not a democratically elected government in the first place, and thus has no authority granted to it by those who are governed. The watchdog organization Global Witness recently released a report that says the QUEST, which is a carbon capture and storage facility co located with Oil Shans operations in Canada, captured five million tons of carbon dioxide since opening in However, it is also released seven point five million tons during that same period, meaning it's emitting more carbon dioxide than it is capturing, which isn't great. Shell, which owns the QUEST, has released a statement saying that the analysis is wrong. General Witness says that the sales pitch for carbon captions capture systems is that they'll capture up to say, nine percent of all emissions and thus store the carbon dock side underground at where it will solidify and not be released into the atmosphere. But Shell says, no, the QUEST was not designed to eliminate nine of emissions. It was designed to capture about a third of the emissions. But you know, the reason why I even want to bring this up at all is whether you're talking or thirty percent. I think carbon capture and storage operations and the emphasis put behind them are kind of dangerous. Not because they don't work, because they can work, and if they're implemented properly, they will store a carbon dioxide in a way that doesn't get released to the atmosphere. That's a good thing. No, I think it's dangerous because those operations presume that we should remain dependent upon fossil fuels in the first place, that we shouldn't migrate away from them on a more aggressive schedule, so they slow us down from getting away from fossil fuels, which are a major contributor to the issues that that then result in climate change. So I don't like a lot of these carbon capture programs simply because it's looking at slapping a band aid on something while the wound is still bleeding around the band aid, whereas I would like to address the actual wound by getting away from the dependence on fossil fuels. So a lot of activists and people like myself deal it's just a better idea to really push these companies to invest more heavily into alternatives to fossil fuels, rather than measures that keep us dependent upon fossil fuels indefinitely. Here in the United States, the Federal Communications Commission or FCC is working to pass a plan that would quote prohibit providers from entering into graduated revenue sharing agreements or exclusive revenue sharing agreements with a building owner, require providers to disclose to tenants in plain language the existence of exclusive marketing arrangements that they have with building owners and end of practice that circumventced the FCCS cable inside wiring rules by clarifying that existing Commission rules prohibits sale and leaseback arrangements that effectively block access to alternative providers. End quote. That's very wordy and it can be a little dense and difficult to parse if you aren't familiar with what's going on. But essentially, what this is saying is the FCC wants to stop a practice where you have someone who owns the building, like an apartment building owner, and that owner enters into an exclusive agreement with a specific I s P or Internet service provider, and that would mean that all the tenants in that apartment building would all have to get their service through that I s P or they wouldn't get service at all. They would have no options when it comes to choosing providers. Uh and a lot of these agreements have kind of kickbacks to building owners, so they get a little something something from the I s P, and in return, the I s P has all these dedicated customers that cannot go anywhere else. And in fact I s p s over the years have had agreements where they would exclusively wire up a building for that specific I s P S services. That's something else that would be expressly off the table according to this FCC plan. The FCC also says that the current practices often prevent tenants the chance to take advantage of the Emergency Broadband Benefit or the newer Affordable Connectivity Program. These are programs that subsidize broadband fees so that people from lower income households can afford to have access to broadband services. But if they're in one of these apartment buildings, they might not have access to those services because that exclusive agreement between building owner and i SP prevents it from ever happening. UH. The FCC would first have to hold an internal vote on this proposed plan before it would become a thing, and typically the FCC consists of five members on the board, but one seat is currently empty. The U. S. Senate has not yet approved the nominee for that fifth seat, and right now there are two Democrats on the FCC and two Republicans on the f c C, so it's kind of in a deadlock. Because at least in the United States, were well beyond the era where you could occasionally expect two political parties to actually work together on something. These days, it seems like it's more important to make sure that folks see that you're opposed to the other side than it is to you know, get stuff done. I'm applying this to both political parties, by the way. I know all you know that where I fall on the political spectrum, it doesn't mean I give a free pass to the people who represent me. Also, I'm grouchy and I apologize all right. Scientists in Germany have created technology meant to help the blind and other visually impaired people navigate their environments without having to make use of something like a cane, and to be able to get a sense for what's in their environment beyond the reach of a cane. So this technology includes a pair of three D printed goggles, so you could you know, print goggles that have a fit to a specific person. And the goggles contain a pair of infrared cameras in them that can get a stereoscopic view of the environment around the person who's wearing them. The goggles are then connected to a system that has an output of haptic feedback vibrating pads UH collected into a sleeve that you wear on your arm, so when the cameras detect that the person wearing it is near an obstacle, The processor sends a signal to those haptic feedback actuators in the sleeve and causes them to vibrate. Uh. The intensity of the vibration indicates the distance to the object, So if you feel a light vibration, it means there's an object in front of you, but it's still a ways out. It just lets you makes you aware that there is an object there, and more intense vibrations tell you that it's closer to you, so you can actually look at something that's that's moving towards you, and through the intensity change, like feeling those vibrations grow more intense, you would realize, Okay, not only is there something in my environment, it's coming towards me. The vibrations are getting stronger. It's getting closer. I may need to move out the way. According to the scientists, tests of the system showed that wearers could avoid obstacles in a totally dark room with accuracy, and moreover that over the course of multiple practice runs, their performance would improve, so they would get more used to how it worked and more adept and navigating their environments, which makes sense and I think of it kind of like a tech version of spiky sense, which I remember actually reading about a similar technology a few years ago. So I'm glad that that work is continuing, and I really do hope that we see something like this go beyond you know, the research lab and get put into actual use so that people who have, say a visual impairment, are more easily able to navigate their environments and you know, give them even more autonomy. I think that's great. And for our final story, the James Web Space Telescope has arrived at its new home in space. It's now about a million miles away from us and it will remain in the lagrange point to or L two orbit as it helps scientists uncover secrets of the universe and its origins. But we won't be diving right into the scientific observations right away. Over the next three months, engineers will run various tests to make certain the telescope's functioning properly and activating all the instruments, and then they will be able to focus on distant galaxies with precision. So this three month period is going to include the alignment of all the mirrors so that it makes a massive single mirror surface um made up of individual mirrors that are all angled in just the right way to focus on whatever the telescope's looking at, and also again checking to make sure all the different instrumentation on the spacecraft is operating properly. Not that there's much we can do about it. If it's not. The James Webb Space Telescope is located beyond our ability to send a crew there. If it's not something we can address wirelessly here on Earth, then we kind of have to do without it. But so far everything has been going according to plan. The engineering teams have already spent the last month very slowly unfurling the telescope as it made its journey to its new home, which had to be pretty tense and also excruciating, because it's not just tense for like a moment. It was a month worth of tension as you're very carefully going through this process and hoping that nothing goes wrong. But yeah, it's pretty exciting stuff, and I am eager to see what the James Web Space Telescope uncovers in the future and what what new things we learned about our universe as a result of this technology giving us more information than we've ever had before. Exciting, all right, that's it for this news episode for Tuesday, January twenty two. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes and tech Stuff, feel free to reach out and let me know about them. The best way to do that is over on Twitter. To handle for the show is text stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon Y. 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, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio. And how the tech are you? It is time for the tech news for Tuesday, January twenty five, twenty twenty two, and the first item is sort of a good news bad news situation. The bad news, at least if you're heavily invested in cryptocurrency, is that the value of various cryptocurrencies have really taken a serious hit over the last several weeks. It's been quite a time for bitcoin. Bitcoin saw its value peak to nearly seventy thousand dollars last year per bitcoin, So one bitcoin was worth nearly seventy grand at its height last year. But as I was writing this episode, it's around thirty six thousand dollars per bitcoin. Now, that's still a heck of a lot of money on a per bitcoin basis, obviously, right, particularly for those of you out there who were aware of cryptocurrency back when bitcoin's value was a fractions of a dollar, It is still a remarkable story. However, it means folks who invested when the cryptocurrency was at a higher value, are probably not too happy right now. Likewise, ethereum, which nearly reached five thousand dollars per unit earlier in the you know, last year, now it's currently at around dollars, so less than half of that. Now, keep in mind, at the beginning of twenty twenty, ethereum was actually below two thousand dollars per ether so it's still above where it was early twenty. So again, I don't want to paint the picture of saying crypto isn't worth anything. That's not the case. We're just seeing a massive drop off in value. Now. There are some people who are predicting that this could be the end of cryptocurrency. I think that that is way too dramatic a prediction. A lot of other folks, myself included, are saying we're probably looking at maybe a rough trend for a while. Uh. After all, the crypto market collectively has lost around a trillion dollars since that high point in bitcoin's history. But there are a lot of factors that are contributing to this all around the world. I'm not gonna make any predictions about what's gonna come next, because again, if you actually look at any chart that plots the value of major cryptocurrencies over time, you'll see that there are periods of wild growth and wild decline. And this is one of the reasons why I actually get down on cryptocurrency so much, because it's so volatile that it's not really an effective currency. It's more of a speculative investment. Anyway, that's the bad news. That crypto is down right now and it is probably in for a rough time in the near future. I suspect we'll see it recover, unless you know, things around the world developed to a point that really spelled doom for cryptocurrency, which could happen. But now let's talk about the good news. So Tom's Hardware reports that the price of GPUs, that is graphics processing units has come down for most models across eBay, and this is most likely linked to the decline in cryptocurrency value. So let me explain now, for bitcoin, GPUs aren't really in the picture, and that's because bitcoins value is so high that people have moved away from GPUs to more specialized processors and systems in order to get the competitive advantage over other Bitcoin miners. Remember to mind cryptocurrency in a proof of work model anyway means you're using computer systems to generate the right answer to what is the actually a math guessing game, and you want to do it first before anyone else does, so you need computer systems that generate guesses faster than anyone else's system does. With Bitcoin, GPUs just can't keep up with the much more expensive specialized hardware that's used by serious bitcoin mining organizations. But Ethereum is different. See Ethereum isn't worth as much as bitcoin is, so it wouldn't make economic sense to use that specialized bitcoin mining equipment for Ethereum because the equipment would cost more than what you would get out of mining the ethereum. So that is where folks typically are relying upon GPU cards for their mining rigs. It's in the Ethereum ecosystem, not the Bitcoin one. But with Ethereum's price falling, the demand for cards has changed, and that means that the price for cards has changed, at least on eBay. Uh it's still danged hard to find a graphics card on the primary market, like the the original points of sale, that is still very hard to do, and those cards there are pretty much holding their market value. So a lot of folks have to look to the secondary market for their equipment, like eBay. I should add that when I say the price has come down, it doesn't mean that the cards are now cheap. For example, the r t X, which is kind of the creme de la creme in the GPU space right now, it is going for around two thousand, five hundred fifty bucks on average for just the graphics card. Remember that's one component in a computer. You would actually have to build out the rest of your computer too. Now that is about a thousand fifty dollars above the cards M S r P. Meaning you know, you should be able to find the the actual card for dollars on the regular market. It's just that people have bought up all the cards and are trying to sell them for a markup on sizes like eBay. So it's still a heck of a markup, right, A thousand dollars, a thousand plus dollars, that's a heck of a markup. But Tom's Hardware points out that if we were to see cryptocurrency value decline further and as companies eliminate shortage issues in the supply chain, as we start to see those ease up, where the supply chain starts to get back into a good working order, then we should see prices in the secondary market continue to come down. In fact, we might even get to a point where people will stop buying up the cards in bulk and trying to sell them on eBay in the first place, because the profit margin will be too low to deal with the hassle. At least a gamer can dream. While we're talking about graphics cards and processors, let's revisit the story of Nvidios quest to acquire ARM, that is, the British chip designer company, or at least founded and operated in Britain, currently owned by a Japanese conglomerate called soft Bank. Well, we first learned of this and acquisition back in September of twenty twenty. It was announced it would be a forty billion dollar deal, and that deal made news around the world for lots of different reasons. There were people who were afraid that in Nvidia buying up ARM would consolidate the semiconductor industry and limit competition, and that would hurt customers down the line, whether those customers are you know, computer manufacturers or end users that you know. Consolidation and markets rarely benefits the end customer. It really benefits whomever is consolidating all the power, but not so much everybody else. And over in the UK, where ARM is based, there were worries that a foreign company America purchasing a British chip designer could open up the possibility of national security issues, ignoring the fact that soft Bank already owned ARM. But whatever, and CNBC now reports that in Video may be ready to abandon their f their f you know this this quest to purchase ARM that you know, regulatory bodies around the world are maybe putting up a little too much resistance and the company is kind of mired and all that and wants to extricate itself. CNBC also reports that soft Bank is preparing to launch an i p O, that is, initial public offering for ARM if this acquisition deal actually does fall through. So in that event, ARM would then spent off to become a publicly traded company on the market, and it would not be acquired by you know, in Vidio. The collapse of the deal would be a pretty big setback for Invidia. Uh and while in Video would no longer be obligated for that forty billion dollar deal, I imagine the company has already spent a healthy chunk of change and resources on the acquisition efforts to date. The news perhaps contributed to Invidious share price, which fell three in pre market trading today. The attorneys general for Washington, d C. And the states of Indiana, Texas, and Washington State are coming after Google. They have filed lawsuits against the company alleging that Google purposefully misled users from two thousand fourteen to two thousand nineteen with regard to location tracking. So the attorneys are saying that Google indicated if you, or at least implied that if you turned off your location history setting on a Android device, for example, that the company would no longer track your location and thus you wouldn't have to worry about them selling your location information to advertisers and the like. But the truth of the matter was that you would actually have to dive a little bit further into your settings and go to the Web and App activity section to turn off location tracking for real z s. So, in other words, it was like there were two switches. There was a more obvious switch labeled location history, but turning that off didn't actually turn off location tracking, and the switch that would turn off location tracking was a trickier one that did exist, but it wasn't as easy to find. It actually reminds me of a sequence in the novel and the radio play and the television series in the movie Hitchhecker's Guide to the Galaxy, where Arthur dent Uh, the protagonist of the series, was trying to seek out a a city Uh press release essentially, or a city order, and that it was purposefully kept in an in an almost inaccessible location to avoid people discovering it. Uh. Kind of similar to that, And the attorneys say that Google didn't really indicate to users that the web and app activity setting was even something they should know about until around two thousand eighteen. Now, the lawsuits that these attorneys general have filed are somewhat similar to one that the State of Arizona filed against Google back in twenty twenty, But the new lawsuit are targeting something that the attorneys general are calling dark patterns, and that's starting to sound a little bit like an epic fantasy, you know, perhaps a plot that used to do or the Wizard would oppose. But in this case, dark patterns really refer to choices made in user interface or UI design, and these are choices that would guide people down certain pathways and de emphasizing other pathways. So, in other words, it's a kind of UI design philosophy meant to provide all the options that you're obligated to provide because of various laws and regulations. Like if the law says you have to give users the option to turn this off, well, this UI design technically fulfills that obligation, but you kind of use like smoke and mirrors so that very few people actually take the effort to go down the correct pathway to find that setting and turn it off. You make it inconvenient, and you make other stuff far more accessible and easy to understand in an effort to try and discourage people from turning off this otherwise extremely lucrative setting. The lawsuit also has something that I've never seen before, which is that the attorneys general are demanding that Google ditch any algorithms that the company created with the money that was generated from leveraging this location data collected from users during that time frame. That's an addition to surrendering any money the Google made during that time from the use of location data. I don't think i've ever seen a case where lawyers were demanding a company surrender algorithms. I'll have to keep an eye on this story as it develops. I also wonder, you know, like, how would they hold Google accountable to determine exactly what money came from what sources and how much would have to be surrendered. It's a pretty complicated thing, and I don't know how it would all be resolved. I'm guessing that the ultimate goal is to force Google to make changes and perhaps pay out a settlement. But um, we'll have to wait and see. I I this one is beyond me. We have a couple more stories about Google, plus a whole lot of other tech news after we come back from this break. Okay, We've got a couple of other little Google news items to talk about before and move on. One is that the company announced it would soon block ad targeting for users under the age of eighteen. Specifically, a press release from Monday says quote, We've already made progress on delivering a safer experience to kids and teens online by expanding safeguards to prevent age sensitive ad categories from being shown to teens, and we block ad targeting based on the age gender or interests of people under eighteen end quote. I'm actually surprised that it took this long for enough pressure to mount against Google to a point where the company made this kind of release. But this is another example of how big tech companies are feeling a pushback from arious governments and agencies around the world. In Europe, obviously, there's been, uh for a while, a growing emphasis placed upon citizen privacy and security and that the companies have to give citizens enough information and options so that they can choose whether or not to have their data collected by various entities and in what context. And we're starting to see that kind of expand to other places in the world, including here in the United States. And obviously the the safety of children is always something that is considered pretty important for obvious reasons, and in recent years we've seen a lot more scrutiny dedicated to that, particularly towards Google, UH, with things like you know, the Google's YouTube algorithms being potentially harmful toward kids. We've also obviously seen it applied to other platform was like Facebook. UH. Now this is also not to say that Google is stopping its practice of pouring resources into developing new ways to track and categorize people now. Previously, Google developed a project that it called Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLOCK, which aimed to phase out tracking cookies for the purposes of gathering information about users as they navigate online. Cookies have had a pretty the controversial past as well. The whole idea behind cookies is that a browser is able to collect certain information through these cookies that remains relevant to that user, so that between browsing sessions, or even within a browsing session, things are smoothed over, right Like otherwise, you might have to log in and adjust your settings for a particular web service every single time you visit it, which is kind of a hass. But cookies can also be used to track your activity and be used in advertisements, so that like an advertiser knows that you were looking at, I don't know, uh, hiking boots, and so the next time you're on Facebook you just see like tons of ads for hiking boots because these cookies have tracked that activity and Facebook was able to leverage that and serve you ads based upon that. Well, now things are changing a little bit. See FLOCK was an idea that would instead lump users into groups of folks who have similar interests, so you would be in independent flocks based upon whatever you were showing interested in. Flock however, now is could put. Google now has a project called Topics, which doesn't sound that different to me. Topics is a project that would track a users activities across the web an attempt to infer what kind of stuff that user was interested in, and Topics will hold on to browsing data for sort of a rolling three week periods. Your last three weeks of browsing will be what determines which topics are tagged to you like, which ones you appear to be interested in. And they're starting off, I think with three topics, but could potentially expand that, and that would be handy information for advertisers, right They would look to see which users have specific topics tagged to them and those would be the ones that would be most relevant to those advertisers. So if an advertiser is looking for someone who like has been tagged as having an avid interest in outdoors the activities, well, they're likely not going to find me on that topics list, and I won't get targeted for those ads. Now, Topics will just be one of several signals that advertisers can select when they work with Google to serve ads to customers. They're not required to use topics, and users will have some control over this as well. You'll be able to view the list of topics that Google has determined your into, and then you can go and strike any off the list you would rather not see advertising four and for looks like yours, truly who I would do pretty much all of my research online. That would be handy for me, because I don't want to be served ads for say, cryptocurrency, all day every day. It's not really my bag. Okay, let's transition to some other stories in activism news. A group of hackers have infected the state run railway system in Belarus with ransomware and essentially locking down the computer systems of the railway system. The activists have said their ransom is that the President of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, must stop helping Russian forces as they amass in preparation for a potential invasion of Ukraine. Ukraine is south of Belarus. Belarus is between Russia and Ukraine, or at least partly that the borders are longer than that, but you get what I'm saying. And the hackers released a message that reads, in part quote, as part of the Peclo cyber campaign, we encrypted the bulk of the servers, databases, and workstations of the bell ZHD being the Belarus railway station or system in order to slow down and disrupt the operation of the road. The backups have been destroyed end quote. The group then goes on to say that the automated systems in this computer network have not been targeted because the group wished to avoid quote unquote emergency situations. In other words, they didn't want to completely cripple the system and deny the capability of responding to an emergency because that would obviously bring harm upon people. That seems pretty darn considerate considering we're talking about, you know, hackers. The activists have demanded the release of fifty political prisoners that are held in Belarus and whom they say are most in need of medical attention, and they also are seeking a commitment from the President of Belarus to resist Russian invasion forces or what they're what they believe to be Russian invasion forces in Israel. A law that would give judges within Israel immense power to force websites to remove content is back on the table after having been rejected back in TwixT. The law, which is casually referred to as the Facebook Law, would grant quote Israeli courts the power to demand the removal of user generated content on social media content platforms that can be perceived as inflammatory or as harming the security of the state or the security of people, or the security of the public. End quote. That's some pretty vague wording. Now, in practice, we tend to see these kinds of policies specifically target Palestinians, especially Palestinians who wish to hold Israel's government accountable for alleged human rights violations, for uh aggress of actions against the Palestinian people, for lots of issues surrounding those aspects of life in Israel and around Palestine, and Israel's right wing government officials have a history of of censoring Palestinian voices. Ramsey Borrowed, a journalist and author, has a detailed post about this law, its history, and what is intended to do in an article titled quote how Israel's Facebook Law plans to control all Palestinian content online? End quote, and Burud points out that the law, while referred to as Facebook Law, would reach far beyond social networking sites to potentially any website at all, and warns that should websites comply with this, it would set a dangerous precedent. That's that's assuming that the law is passed as written, but also that you know, if companies actually agree to it. The article is a very good read. I recommend you seek it out. All right, We've got a few more stories to cover before we wrap up this news episode. But before we get to that, let's take another quick break. In Myanmar, the military, which effectively rules the nation after a military coup from last year, is preparing to pass a cybersecurity law that would make it illegal for citizens to use virtual private networks, or VPNs. The regime has previously banned the uses of social networking services like Facebook and Twitter after the military coup, but people in Myanmar can still access those services if they use a VPN. You log into the VPN, the VPN then logs into the service and it's a work around. But now the military wants to outlaw VPNs and close that loophole. This is yet another move by the military to control the population of the n bar. In fact, last month, the regime doubled the amount of tax that the government places on mobile internet data, so they're really trying to crack down on citizens abilities to communicate with one another and to communicate ideas that are in opposition to the military regime. The law goes much further than just banning VPNs, however, it essentially grants the government unlimited rights to access citizens data and to ban any content that the regime objects to. In fact, just reading over reports about this law makes the Great Firewall of China seem tamed by comparison, at least to me. Activists around the world are raising alarm, with many saying that the regime should have no power to draft and enact laws because it's not a democratically elected government in the first place, and thus has no authority granted to it by those who are governed. The watchdog organization Global Witness recently released a report that says the QUEST, which is a carbon capture and storage facility co located with Oil Shans operations in Canada, captured five million tons of carbon dioxide since opening in However, it is also released seven point five million tons during that same period, meaning it's emitting more carbon dioxide than it is capturing, which isn't great. Shell, which owns the QUEST, has released a statement saying that the analysis is wrong. General Witness says that the sales pitch for carbon captions capture systems is that they'll capture up to say, nine percent of all emissions and thus store the carbon dock side underground at where it will solidify and not be released into the atmosphere. But Shell says, no, the QUEST was not designed to eliminate nine of emissions. It was designed to capture about a third of the emissions. But you know, the reason why I even want to bring this up at all is whether you're talking or thirty percent. I think carbon capture and storage operations and the emphasis put behind them are kind of dangerous. Not because they don't work, because they can work, and if they're implemented properly, they will store a carbon dioxide in a way that doesn't get released to the atmosphere. That's a good thing. No, I think it's dangerous because those operations presume that we should remain dependent upon fossil fuels in the first place, that we shouldn't migrate away from them on a more aggressive schedule, so they slow us down from getting away from fossil fuels, which are a major contributor to the issues that that then result in climate change. So I don't like a lot of these carbon capture programs simply because it's looking at slapping a band aid on something while the wound is still bleeding around the band aid, whereas I would like to address the actual wound by getting away from the dependence on fossil fuels. So a lot of activists and people like myself deal it's just a better idea to really push these companies to invest more heavily into alternatives to fossil fuels, rather than measures that keep us dependent upon fossil fuels indefinitely. Here in the United States, the Federal Communications Commission or FCC is working to pass a plan that would quote prohibit providers from entering into graduated revenue sharing agreements or exclusive revenue sharing agreements with a building owner, require providers to disclose to tenants in plain language the existence of exclusive marketing arrangements that they have with building owners and end of practice that circumventced the FCCS cable inside wiring rules by clarifying that existing Commission rules prohibits sale and leaseback arrangements that effectively block access to alternative providers. End quote. That's very wordy and it can be a little dense and difficult to parse if you aren't familiar with what's going on. But essentially, what this is saying is the FCC wants to stop a practice where you have someone who owns the building, like an apartment building owner, and that owner enters into an exclusive agreement with a specific I s P or Internet service provider, and that would mean that all the tenants in that apartment building would all have to get their service through that I s P or they wouldn't get service at all. They would have no options when it comes to choosing providers. Uh and a lot of these agreements have kind of kickbacks to building owners, so they get a little something something from the I s P, and in return, the I s P has all these dedicated customers that cannot go anywhere else. And in fact I s p s over the years have had agreements where they would exclusively wire up a building for that specific I s P S services. That's something else that would be expressly off the table according to this FCC plan. The FCC also says that the current practices often prevent tenants the chance to take advantage of the Emergency Broadband Benefit or the newer Affordable Connectivity Program. These are programs that subsidize broadband fees so that people from lower income households can afford to have access to broadband services. But if they're in one of these apartment buildings, they might not have access to those services because that exclusive agreement between building owner and i SP prevents it from ever happening. UH. The FCC would first have to hold an internal vote on this proposed plan before it would become a thing, and typically the FCC consists of five members on the board, but one seat is currently empty. The U. S. Senate has not yet approved the nominee for that fifth seat, and right now there are two Democrats on the FCC and two Republicans on the f c C, so it's kind of in a deadlock. Because at least in the United States, were well beyond the era where you could occasionally expect two political parties to actually work together on something. These days, it seems like it's more important to make sure that folks see that you're opposed to the other side than it is to you know, get stuff done. I'm applying this to both political parties, by the way. I know all you know that where I fall on the political spectrum, it doesn't mean I give a free pass to the people who represent me. Also, I'm grouchy and I apologize all right. Scientists in Germany have created technology meant to help the blind and other visually impaired people navigate their environments without having to make use of something like a cane, and to be able to get a sense for what's in their environment beyond the reach of a cane. So this technology includes a pair of three D printed goggles, so you could you know, print goggles that have a fit to a specific person. And the goggles contain a pair of infrared cameras in them that can get a stereoscopic view of the environment around the person who's wearing them. The goggles are then connected to a system that has an output of haptic feedback vibrating pads UH collected into a sleeve that you wear on your arm, so when the cameras detect that the person wearing it is near an obstacle, The processor sends a signal to those haptic feedback actuators in the sleeve and causes them to vibrate. Uh. The intensity of the vibration indicates the distance to the object, So if you feel a light vibration, it means there's an object in front of you, but it's still a ways out. It just lets you makes you aware that there is an object there, and more intense vibrations tell you that it's closer to you, so you can actually look at something that's that's moving towards you, and through the intensity change, like feeling those vibrations grow more intense, you would realize, Okay, not only is there something in my environment, it's coming towards me. The vibrations are getting stronger. It's getting closer. I may need to move out the way. According to the scientists, tests of the system showed that wearers could avoid obstacles in a totally dark room with accuracy, and moreover that over the course of multiple practice runs, their performance would improve, so they would get more used to how it worked and more adept and navigating their environments, which makes sense and I think of it kind of like a tech version of spiky sense, which I remember actually reading about a similar technology a few years ago. So I'm glad that that work is continuing, and I really do hope that we see something like this go beyond you know, the research lab and get put into actual use so that people who have, say a visual impairment, are more easily able to navigate their environments and you know, give them even more autonomy. I think that's great. And for our final story, the James Web Space Telescope has arrived at its new home in space. It's now about a million miles away from us and it will remain in the lagrange point to or L two orbit as it helps scientists uncover secrets of the universe and its origins. But we won't be diving right into the scientific observations right away. Over the next three months, engineers will run various tests to make certain the telescope's functioning properly and activating all the instruments, and then they will be able to focus on distant galaxies with precision. So this three month period is going to include the alignment of all the mirrors so that it makes a massive single mirror surface um made up of individual mirrors that are all angled in just the right way to focus on whatever the telescope's looking at, and also again checking to make sure all the different instrumentation on the spacecraft is operating properly. Not that there's much we can do about it. If it's not. The James Webb Space Telescope is located beyond our ability to send a crew there. If it's not something we can address wirelessly here on Earth, then we kind of have to do without it. But so far everything has been going according to plan. The engineering teams have already spent the last month very slowly unfurling the telescope as it made its journey to its new home, which had to be pretty tense and also excruciating, because it's not just tense for like a moment. It was a month worth of tension as you're very carefully going through this process and hoping that nothing goes wrong. But yeah, it's pretty exciting stuff, and I am eager to see what the James Web Space Telescope uncovers in the future and what what new things we learned about our universe as a result of this technology giving us more information than we've ever had before. Exciting, all right, that's it for this news episode for Tuesday, January twenty two. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes and tech Stuff, feel free to reach out and let me know about them. The best way to do that is over on Twitter. To handle for the show is text stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon Y. 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