Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. He 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's time for the tech news for November two thousand, twin d two and I didn't have a news episode this past Tuesday, which means we've got a little bit of a Twitter backup to get through because things are still going bonkers over there. Starting off in Twitter b E. That is, before Elon, the corporate culture encouraged internal criticism. Some would say criticism was tolerated to a fault in fact, but the point is Twitter employees were never punished for criticizing company leadership or policies. Well, that's very much changed. One engineer, Eric Fraunhofer, who had worked for Twitter for eight years and got involved in a Twitter conversation with Elon Musk in an effort to correct what he saw his Musk's errors regarding how Twitter operates on a technical level, has been let go. He has since said that Musk was just completely wrong about Twitter's technical operations and so he was stepping in to actually provide the real answers. Musk did not care for that critique, and fron Huffer was fired. A couple of other employees were similarly let go for doing similar things, and the following day some Twitter employees expressed support for their former colleagues, and they too were shown the door, which led to a lot of Twitter employees going back and scrubbing their various accounts uh messages on like Twitter and Slack and that kind of thing in an effort to not hire Sawon. I guess, And according to Casey Newton, who does an incredible newsletter each several times a week actually about tech, about two dozen folks were affected by these firings. Some other outlets are reporting even more than that. So the word seems to be you don't criticize Elon Musk or you'll get canned. So I guess the free speech absolutist has his own thoughts about the kinds of speech that shouldn't be expressed. Though, to be fair, free speech has never met You're actually free from the consequences of what you say, only that you are allowed to say it. So yeah, I'm being a bit cheeky here. Anyway, Several of the folks fired had been at Twitter for nearly a decade or longer, which is bad news for a company that recently purged about half of all employees and still needs to get stuff done. As for those left behind, well, they have a tough decision to make. Today. Elon Musk has issued a deadline. Twitter employees must fill out an online form to indicate whether or not they will be willing to do grueling work at long hours or else leave the company. Musk alerted employees to this yesterday in an email titled a fork in the Road. So they have until the end of today to fill out the form. And y'all, this is smelling awful, similar to a loyalty pledge, which is given me seriously bad vibes. But for some a Twitter, this could be the push they need to determine if they in fact want to stay at the company and try to transform the platform or hack just keep it running while working with half the personnel, or if they'd rather take a chance and make a big career change, which is tough in a market where you're seeing lots of layoffs across big tech. It could be that Musk is actually looking to further thin the ranks of Twitter though much of the analysis that I have read suggests that such a move would be risky because it's already going to be hard for the remaining staff to just keep things going while also creating the projects that Musk wants implemented. On a related note, Elon Musk had to appear in a court in Delaware to defend his fifty six billion dollar compensation package at Tesla. We'll talk more about Tesla in a second. This lawsuit came from Tesla shareholder Richard Tornetta, who accuses Tesla and Elon Musk for leveraging a compliant board of directors to create an insanely lucrative compensation package from Musk while hiding crucial information from shareholders who were encouraged to sign off on this compensation deal, which they did. In his testimony, Musk said he intends to find someone else to run Twitter in the future, but later that same day, which again was just yesterday, he said it would take some time because he wants to hand Twitter over once it is in a quote unquote strong place. Well, considering how things have been going for Twitter over the last couple of weeks and the amount of ground that's been lost as various advertisers have pulled back from the platform. It may take a long time for Twitter to be in a strong place, So why would Musk talk about Twitter in a trial that's really about his compensation with Tesla. Well, several Tesla shareholders have shown concerned that Musk is far too distracted by Twitter to lead Tesla effectively. According to The Wall Street Journal, Tesla board member James Murdoch has said that Musk has someone in mind who would serve as CEO of Tesla as well, indicating that perhaps Musk is thinking of handing control over to another person. Musk says he thinks of himself now as a leader, but as an engineer, something that I think fron Hoffer would take Umbridge to. Anyway, this trial will be decided by a judge. It is not a jury trial, so a judge ultimately makes the decision about whether or not Tesla and the board of directors misled shareholders. Uh interesting side note that that judge is Chancellor Kathleen McCormick. She happens to be the judge who was also overseeing Twitter's lawsuit against Musk back when Musk was still trying to back out of his acquisition deal. That was the trial that ultimately got called off because Musk ultimately agreed to buy Twitter. Speaking of Tesla, the US government has released data showing that Tesla has identified two additional car crash fatalities connected to its driver assistance systems, but details are a bit scarce. One of those two accidents happened nearly a year ago, so it's kind of shocking to get word of it now. But both happened in California. Both involved some form of driver assistance modes being engaged. But the NHTSA, the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration uh OR authority rather doesn't distinguish between autopilot and full self driving, So I don't know which mode was actually in operation for either of these crashes. It could have been one or the other. The n h t s A categorizes both autopilot and full self driving from Tesla as s A E level two on the Driving Automation Scale. Now remember that scale goes from zero, which has really no active driver assist features. It could have warnings and stuff like that, but it doesn't. It doesn't really take over control of the vehicle, and then you go all the way up to level five, which is where you have a fully automated vehicle, where you know there are no controls for humans at all. The whole thing is is is vehicle operated. But level two, where both autopilot and full self driving are still requires human operation and human attention. Since July of two thousand twenty one, almost all of the fatal accidents involving driver assistance systems that have been reported to the nh T s A have been Tesla vehicles or have involved Tesla vehicles. But the NHT essay also points out there's not a standardized approach across all automakers, all car manufacturers on how to track crashes that involve some form of driver assistance system in them. So, because there's not a unified and standardized approach here, you cannot definitively say that one brand of car is inherently less safe than another. So while you look at this this set of figures and you say, wow, Tesla's a driver assistance systems have led to some terrible accidents, I mean that is true, but it doesn't give you the full story because we don't have a unified version of metrics and processes so that we can definitively say, all right, this company seems to be doing something far more effect active and responsible than this company. We can't really do that because it's not a level playing field, because we don't know all the different methodologies used to track and report this data, which makes it not really that useful. In my mind, I think we need to create standards that that need to be adopted by the entire industry in order to have a better view of what's actually happening. I know I dump on Tesla a lot, but I don't think it's fair to draw a conclusion that Tesla is inherently worse at this than other companies when we know that there's not a standardized way to actually get metrics on all of this and some more bad news for Elon Musk, this time stemming from SpaceX. So this past summer, five SpaceX employees signed off on a letter that called on the company to acknowledge and condemn Elon Musk's behavior on Twitter relating to a news rep art that SpaceX had settled a sexual harassment lawsuit out of court, one that involved Musk and an employee of SpaceX. So these five employees, who's who wrote this letter saying Elon Musk's behavior was unacceptable and the company should call him out on it. Then found themselves out of a job, and the following day around twenty engineers had to attend a meeting in which a Tesla VP named John Edwards allegedly equated the letter to an quote unquote extremist act. That loyalty pledged thing I mentioned about Twitter seems to apply to Musk's other operations, I guess anyway. Some of these employees say that the letter ultimately led to nine people getting fired from SpaceX. Eight of them have now joined in an effort with the National Labor Relations Board or in l RB to bring unfair labor practices charges against SpaceX. Moreover, this issue seems to add to this this perception that Elon Musk very much does not like having his authority questioned or restricted in any way. It's not a good look. Is kind of authoritarian in its approach, and again, like having someone being very flippant about a sexual harassment lawsuit being dismissed doesn't come across great either. Anyway. That's all the Twitter slash Elon Musk stuff I have for now, So that's good. When we come back. We'll move on to totally different tech news. We're back. Sir Christopher Home, a man who came from humble beginnings to rise to billionaire in the world of financial trading, has some stern words for Google, or specifically Google's parent company, Alphabet. So Hans Hedge Fund, which is called t c I, has a massive steak in Alphabet. It's valued at around six billion dollars billion with a B. And Han recently sent a letter to Alphabet arguing that Alphabet one has too many employees, to it pays its employees way too much, and three it wastes too much money on projects that don't drive revenue and accrew huge losses. So he's calling for Alphabet to downsize and eliminate employee positions that he feels the company has, you know, too many of. He's saying that there are too many people working there and they're not doing enough work. That this is inefficient and costly and should be addressed quickly. Moreover, he wants to see the folks who are at Alphabet make less money, because Alphabet's median salary is somewhere je shy of three hundred thousand dollars a year. That's according to filings with the SEC, which is a big old wow, like the median salaries around three hundred k. Wow. Now, I imagine that doesn't include like contractors and that sort of thing, but still three d k that's a lot of cheddar. And you know, Hans thinks it's too much cheddar, as more cheddar should be going to the billionaires like him. I guess. I mean, I get that Alphabet's compensation is well above that of the competition, but I find it hard to be on the side of a guy who literally has more wealth than most people, including myself, will ever come close to hard to side with the super rich guy, you know. But anyway, he also wants to see subsidiaries like Weymo get the old Google treatment and get shut down. Weymo is Google's self driving vehicle company, and Weymo, he argues, has lost billions of dollars while other car manufacturers have kind of backed off of trying to make autonomous cars reality. He cited some various initiatives that had previously been launched and since abandoned and says Google should do the same thing. So will Alphabet capitulate to his demands? Well, the tech industry as a whole is definitely slimming down due to various economic pressures. Because we're in that ding dang durn economic uncertainty that we still have not really named. I think we're gonna skip recession and go straight to depression personally, but anyway, it would not be surprising to see Alphabet make a move like this. We know that Google has been pulling back on hires and also has started to restrict things like company travel, so it would not be surprising to see Alphabet make that move, especially since we know so many other companies in the tech space are are doing that. In fact, while we're on the topic of layoffs, let's talk Amazon. Just as we're entering the frenzy of the holiday season, though maybe the season will be less of a frenzy due to the aforementioned economic uncertainty, Amazon is following the band and has begun to layoff employees. Some reports suggest that these layoffs could reach around ten thousand jobs total. The company started by laying off employees who are working in the hardware divisions, which produces stuff like Amazon Fire, Amazon Echo, the Kindle, and devices with Amazon's personal assistant, whom I will not name so that you're smart speakers don't talk back at me because they're mean. You should have a discussion with those smart speakers about their behavior. Words can hurt anyway. It's just a super tough time at the big tech companies right now with so many people being let go. And I can speak from experience, it fights to get laid off around Thanksgiving. I had that happened to me at a former job, and even seventeen years later, it still stings. The cuts at Amazon are mostly targeting corporate staff and might amount to around three percent of the total workforce, but the company's warehouse divisions are unlikely to see extensive cuts. That makes sense. We are getting into the holidays, there's going to be a lot of activity in those warehouses, so it makes sense that the cuts were seeing are going to be on the corporate side, not necessarily the warehouse side. CNBC reports that Amazon has sent out a voluntary severance message to some employees, giving them the option to take a severance package and leave the company voluntarily rather than risk being laid off later down the road. Those employees will have until November twenty nine to make their decision, and if they take the package. Their employment with Amazon will end on December twenty three. By the way, I saw that Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder, has dedicated to giving away almost all of his wealth two various charitable organizations and efforts. And I saw that someone had posted clearly he was visited by three spirits, So good on you. I wish I had your name in front of me, because that was a great joke and I really laughed when I saw it. Okay, let's talk about Netflix, and Netflix has announced a change to how subscribers can manage access to various devices. So previously cutting off access revoking access to devices was an all or nothing deal. You could revoke access to all devices you had signed into. Let's say you did something silly like let's say you went to stay at an Airbnb and they had a smart TV, so you logged into your Netflix account and then you left the Airbnb, but you realize you forgot to log out of that smart TV, so your account is still active on there. Well, you could revoke access, but the problem was it applied to every single device you were logged into, so you lost everything, which meant that you had to go through the whole process of getting access again for the stuff you actually own, like say, your own television or whatever. Well, now Netflix is letting users get more granular. You can revoke access to specific devices while you retain it everywhere else. It also gives users the chance to shut down access to their account if, for example, they lent it to say that no good mooture of a cousin of yours or whatever. Maybe I'm projecting anyway, because Netflix will be instituting a sub account charge for users who let other households also access their accounts. This move lets users nope right on out of that by cutting off the access. So instead of Netflix saying, hey, we noticed that this other household is using your account regularly, sometimes at the same time you're using the account, so we're gonna charge you a monthly fee to have this additional uh feed go out, you could say, you know what, I'm just going to revoke that access and I'm good. I'll just pay mine and then they can go and get their own Netflix account. So that is going to be an option to although really Netflix is pointing more at the case I mentioned where you've perhaps traveled somewhere, logged into Netflix, forgot the log out and you wanted to revoke access that way. Anyway, the feature is now live to all Netflix users, and may the odds be ever in your favor. Meta is making some changes to what Facebook users will display in their profiles. Starting on December one, Facebook is going to remove some fields that are currently active in profiles. Those fields include religious views, political views, the interested in field, which in this case the interested in relates to sexual orientation, as well as the address field. All of those are to go away starting December one. Meta has not yet shared what prompted this decision, like, we know what's going to happen, but the company has not yet said why it's made this decision. I think it might be to mitigate issues like harassment that could potentially be part of it, but the company has not said for sure. Ever. Note, the note taking app that burst onto the scene in two thousand eight, announced that the mobile developer company called Bending Spoons will acquire ever note early next year. And Evernote made a pretty big splash when it first debuted, But honestly, I had not heard very much about it over the last several years. Apparently I'm not alone. They kind of fell into semi obscurity. I mean, the people who love every Note continued to love every Note, although from what I understand, the service made some changes that upset a lot of users before backing off of those changes. But this announcement said that this upcoming merger will allow every Note to make quote accelerated improvements across our teams, professional, personal and free offerings, which is fantastic news for lovers of Evernote everywhere end quote. Glad to hear it. I would like to see folks continue to be gainfully employed and be able to work on a on a platform that they really believe in. Also, I want to say, bending spoons is a pretty funny name. Just makes me think of your ee Geller and the Charlatans who claim that they can use psychic powers to bend spoons, when in fact the psychic powers are actually their hands. Okay, enough of my skeptical critique. We're gonna take another quick break. When we come back, we have a couple more news items to get through. Okay, this next story is pretty upsetting. Israel has deployed robotic guns on guard towers in the West Bank. The guns use artificial intelligence to identify and track targets, but are actually fired remotely by guards who are stationed inside these guard towers. So while the guns are using computer assist aiming, kind of like what you see in video games, especially video games that allow players on console to go up against PC gamers, because you know, console controllers don't have the same level of speed and precision as a mouse and keyboard, so often console players get a little aim assist boost where the computer helps guide those crosshairs just a little bit so you can get hits. This AI does effectively the same thing, but to a real world gun, not a video game gun. However, a human being still has to fire the gun, so the guns are outfitted with what Israel refers to as non lethal ammunition, which includes stuff like tear gas and sponge tipped bullets. I think non lethal might be a bit aspirational there. Let's say that they are intended to be non lethal anyway. The location of these guns is around the Palestinian refugee camp, which has led to criticism that Israel is using Palestinians as targets to train its AI, while the Israeli government claims that the guns are there to protect both Israeli and Palestinian lives activist Issa Amro criticized the tech and said that the possibility that could be misused or even hacked, which is terrifying, puts thousands of lives at risk. Even if it's never hacked. The fact that people could think that such a thing could happen means that you've got this this tool of fear there right Like it's terrifying to think about. So you don't even need the hack to happen for it to already have a negative impact, not to mention that, I think just having a robotic gun as a negative impact on the face of its full stop. Meanwhile, Omar Shakir, a leader at Human Rights Watch, warrens that using AI assisted weapons with a remote ire could put Israel on a slippery slope toward becoming quote a powder keg for human rights abuse end quote. We've seen several robotics companies recently pledged to never develop any sort of weapons systems. But while that's reassuring, we also know that military is around the world, including the United States military, are working hard to do just that, to build robotic platforms for weapons, and that you know we've seen that with drones. I mean, that's one robotic platform that has weapons, but we're seeing it across multiple implementations now, and you can kind of understand why. I mean, there's this desire to create weapons that keep your own soldiers out of harm's way. Right this way, you're not putting your soldiers lives at risk. But critics really fear that a use and implementation of robotic platforms will lead to more conflicts around the world. There will be less resistance to getting into armed conflicts if you're thinking that your side doesn't really risk any losses, and that can see widespread human rights crises as a result, which is the big reason why I'm dead set against robotic weapons platforms. Intel launched a new product called fake Catcher, which is designed to detect deep fake videos. Now. According to Intel, fake Catcher has a nineties accuracy rate in detecting deep fakes. The product looks for tail tale signs of face and landmark manipulations, you know, movements that might be too subtle for humans to really pick up on, but that indicate a computer generated the image or video. It even looks for really small indicators like how our veins change color as our hearts pump blood through them, which is kind of creepy. And there's a growing concern over how deep fakes could be used to push misinformation campaigns or to smear someone by posting fake content of them. And of course there's also the terrible world of deep fake adult content, where innocent people have had their images used in this kind of adult content without their consent, and that can lead to really harmful situations, everything from uh, you know, professional impact to mental and emotional trauma. So it is important that we have tools developed that are good at detecting deep fix Of course, the flip side of that is that we often see this as a seesaw kind of approach. Right. As tools get better at detecting deep fakes, deep fakes get better at evading tools, and the process continues. Activision Blizzard will be suspending several online games in China due to a failure to reach a licensing deal with Chinese game company net Ease. So let's break this down really quickly. Net Ease is a game's publisher and distributor in China. Blizzard has partnered with net Ease to bring certain titles like World of Warcraft, over Watch two, Diablo three, and more to the Chinese market, but this lie something. Agreement expires every so often and then comes up for renegotiation, and apparently the most recent negotiation talks broke down as Blizzard failed to reach an agreement for certain titles. Other ones will remain unaffected because they're under separate agreements. So after January twenty three, games that include World of Warcraft, Overwatch two, Diablow three, Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, StarCraft, and Warcraft three Reforged will become unavailable in China. Other titles like Diablow Immortal will continue development in China because, as I said, they were part of a separate deal that was already signed. Apparently, some of the obstacles blocking this deal centered around not distribution, but the ownership of intellectual property and and player data. So Blizzard says it's working to find alternatives to bring titles back to Chinese players, but there's no telling on when or if that will happen. Microsoft has made a move that will likely send at least some corporate leaders to throw a tantrum. The company has introduced games in its Microsoft Teams product in an app called Games for Work. So the games include a bunch of casual titles, stuff like mind Sweeper, Solitaire, that sort of stuff. But they also have multiplayer capability, so it allows employees to match up against their coworkers in various games. So you can go up against someone else in a game of Solitaire to the death. Okay, I got a little carried away. It's probably not to the death. Microsoft says that their data shows employees who play games together for forty five minutes are then more productive than those who engage in other team building activities. But based on how some bosses, particularly in the tech space, seemed to be obsessed with monitoring employees, I can't see this going over well at a lot of places. Nope, work is supposed to be oppressive and joy list, so forget about games. Maybe I'm just projecting now. To be clear, I'm being facetious. I still work remotely. I have not been pressured to return to the office, and as long as I keep regular hours, everything's pretty cool for me. But I realized that my situation is kind of an outlier in the tech space, and that stinks. I think tons of companies actually really benefited from employees working remotely with more autonomy. Anyway, the game's app is available now, and Microsoft says it will soon be updating the service with more features and more games. So maybe you'll end up playing games on Microsoft Teams with teammates occasionally when you're taking a break, which sounds kind of cool to me. Finally, Upside Foods has received pre market consultation approval from the Food and Drug Administration in the U s a k A the f d A. And why the heck am I covering a food story in tech stuff? Well, Upside food makes chicken. Like. This company doesn't butcher chickens and then sell the meat. It makes chicken meat. That's right. Upside Foods is a company that makes lab grown meat, meaning the company harvests animal cells but doesn't slaughter the animals, and it cultivates those cells and bioreactors to make lab grown meat. The FDA approval is an important step towards bringing this product to market, though there are several other steps that have to happen. First. For one thing, the lab will require an inspection from the United States Department of Agriculture a k the U S d A, and then the FDA will actually have to inspect the real food produced before it could be sold in the US, so there are other regulatory steps that have to be made, but the f d A pre approval stage is a necessary and important step. Also, Upside Foods will have to take some time to scale up production if it passes all these inspections, it's not going to be able to go into mass production right away. And in fact, the company plans to provide lab grown chicken only to fancy schmancy restaurants when it starts off, so there will definitely be a huge up charge in the beginning because you'll have to travel to some pretty exclusive restaurants to get a bite of Upside chicken. And that makes sense because the process to grow the meat is itself incredibly expensive. In fact, analysts estimate that once it hits market, lab grown meat will be maybe three times or more expensive than your typical butchered meat, and I'm guessing that's gonna be a massive impediment to its adoption. They might be a massive impediment even to get into grocery stores. I don't think most folks can necessarily afford to triple the amount of money they spend on meat, even if they are comforted by the idea that no animal died to provide that meat, So I imagine this kind of gradual rollout is one that can lead to reductions and production cost over time. Personally, I'm all for the lab grown approach. I you think that it's going to take time to perfect it so that things like taste and consistency are really on par with what you would get if you were buying fresh meat. But the idea of being able to do that without harming animals, and also being able to scale back the livestock industry, which is a huge environmental impact on our world right. If we're able to scale that back significantly, that would be a huge, huge wind as far as fighting against climate change. So there are multiple reasons to really be on board with lab grown meat. Um, but it's gonna take a while for us to get to a point where it becomes cost effective. When it starts off, it's gonna be so prohibitively expensive that only super fancy pants people are going to get a chance to try it. Um. If a fancy pants restaurant that serves lab grown meat wants to invite me to try some, I'm happy to do it. I just can't you know, I can't take out a loan to have an appetizer. All right, That wraps up this episode of tech Stuff News. If you would like to get in touch with me, tell me about something you would like me to cover in the future. You can do that in a couple of different ways. One is to download the I Heart Radio app. It is free to download, free to use. You can just navigate over to tech Stuff by putting that into the search bar. You'll see tech Stuff pop up. 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Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. He 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's time for the tech news for November two thousand, twin d two and I didn't have a news episode this past Tuesday, which means we've got a little bit of a Twitter backup to get through because things are still going bonkers over there. Starting off in Twitter b E. That is, before Elon, the corporate culture encouraged internal criticism. Some would say criticism was tolerated to a fault in fact, but the point is Twitter employees were never punished for criticizing company leadership or policies. Well, that's very much changed. One engineer, Eric Fraunhofer, who had worked for Twitter for eight years and got involved in a Twitter conversation with Elon Musk in an effort to correct what he saw his Musk's errors regarding how Twitter operates on a technical level, has been let go. He has since said that Musk was just completely wrong about Twitter's technical operations and so he was stepping in to actually provide the real answers. Musk did not care for that critique, and fron Huffer was fired. A couple of other employees were similarly let go for doing similar things, and the following day some Twitter employees expressed support for their former colleagues, and they too were shown the door, which led to a lot of Twitter employees going back and scrubbing their various accounts uh messages on like Twitter and Slack and that kind of thing in an effort to not hire Sawon. I guess, And according to Casey Newton, who does an incredible newsletter each several times a week actually about tech, about two dozen folks were affected by these firings. Some other outlets are reporting even more than that. So the word seems to be you don't criticize Elon Musk or you'll get canned. So I guess the free speech absolutist has his own thoughts about the kinds of speech that shouldn't be expressed. Though, to be fair, free speech has never met You're actually free from the consequences of what you say, only that you are allowed to say it. So yeah, I'm being a bit cheeky here. Anyway, Several of the folks fired had been at Twitter for nearly a decade or longer, which is bad news for a company that recently purged about half of all employees and still needs to get stuff done. As for those left behind, well, they have a tough decision to make. Today. Elon Musk has issued a deadline. Twitter employees must fill out an online form to indicate whether or not they will be willing to do grueling work at long hours or else leave the company. Musk alerted employees to this yesterday in an email titled a fork in the Road. So they have until the end of today to fill out the form. And y'all, this is smelling awful, similar to a loyalty pledge, which is given me seriously bad vibes. But for some a Twitter, this could be the push they need to determine if they in fact want to stay at the company and try to transform the platform or hack just keep it running while working with half the personnel, or if they'd rather take a chance and make a big career change, which is tough in a market where you're seeing lots of layoffs across big tech. It could be that Musk is actually looking to further thin the ranks of Twitter though much of the analysis that I have read suggests that such a move would be risky because it's already going to be hard for the remaining staff to just keep things going while also creating the projects that Musk wants implemented. On a related note, Elon Musk had to appear in a court in Delaware to defend his fifty six billion dollar compensation package at Tesla. We'll talk more about Tesla in a second. This lawsuit came from Tesla shareholder Richard Tornetta, who accuses Tesla and Elon Musk for leveraging a compliant board of directors to create an insanely lucrative compensation package from Musk while hiding crucial information from shareholders who were encouraged to sign off on this compensation deal, which they did. In his testimony, Musk said he intends to find someone else to run Twitter in the future, but later that same day, which again was just yesterday, he said it would take some time because he wants to hand Twitter over once it is in a quote unquote strong place. Well, considering how things have been going for Twitter over the last couple of weeks and the amount of ground that's been lost as various advertisers have pulled back from the platform. It may take a long time for Twitter to be in a strong place, So why would Musk talk about Twitter in a trial that's really about his compensation with Tesla. Well, several Tesla shareholders have shown concerned that Musk is far too distracted by Twitter to lead Tesla effectively. According to The Wall Street Journal, Tesla board member James Murdoch has said that Musk has someone in mind who would serve as CEO of Tesla as well, indicating that perhaps Musk is thinking of handing control over to another person. Musk says he thinks of himself now as a leader, but as an engineer, something that I think fron Hoffer would take Umbridge to. Anyway, this trial will be decided by a judge. It is not a jury trial, so a judge ultimately makes the decision about whether or not Tesla and the board of directors misled shareholders. Uh interesting side note that that judge is Chancellor Kathleen McCormick. She happens to be the judge who was also overseeing Twitter's lawsuit against Musk back when Musk was still trying to back out of his acquisition deal. That was the trial that ultimately got called off because Musk ultimately agreed to buy Twitter. Speaking of Tesla, the US government has released data showing that Tesla has identified two additional car crash fatalities connected to its driver assistance systems, but details are a bit scarce. One of those two accidents happened nearly a year ago, so it's kind of shocking to get word of it now. But both happened in California. Both involved some form of driver assistance modes being engaged. But the NHTSA, the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration uh OR authority rather doesn't distinguish between autopilot and full self driving, So I don't know which mode was actually in operation for either of these crashes. It could have been one or the other. The n h t s A categorizes both autopilot and full self driving from Tesla as s A E level two on the Driving Automation Scale. Now remember that scale goes from zero, which has really no active driver assist features. It could have warnings and stuff like that, but it doesn't. It doesn't really take over control of the vehicle, and then you go all the way up to level five, which is where you have a fully automated vehicle, where you know there are no controls for humans at all. The whole thing is is is vehicle operated. But level two, where both autopilot and full self driving are still requires human operation and human attention. Since July of two thousand twenty one, almost all of the fatal accidents involving driver assistance systems that have been reported to the nh T s A have been Tesla vehicles or have involved Tesla vehicles. But the NHT essay also points out there's not a standardized approach across all automakers, all car manufacturers on how to track crashes that involve some form of driver assistance system in them. So, because there's not a unified and standardized approach here, you cannot definitively say that one brand of car is inherently less safe than another. So while you look at this this set of figures and you say, wow, Tesla's a driver assistance systems have led to some terrible accidents, I mean that is true, but it doesn't give you the full story because we don't have a unified version of metrics and processes so that we can definitively say, all right, this company seems to be doing something far more effect active and responsible than this company. We can't really do that because it's not a level playing field, because we don't know all the different methodologies used to track and report this data, which makes it not really that useful. In my mind, I think we need to create standards that that need to be adopted by the entire industry in order to have a better view of what's actually happening. I know I dump on Tesla a lot, but I don't think it's fair to draw a conclusion that Tesla is inherently worse at this than other companies when we know that there's not a standardized way to actually get metrics on all of this and some more bad news for Elon Musk, this time stemming from SpaceX. So this past summer, five SpaceX employees signed off on a letter that called on the company to acknowledge and condemn Elon Musk's behavior on Twitter relating to a news rep art that SpaceX had settled a sexual harassment lawsuit out of court, one that involved Musk and an employee of SpaceX. So these five employees, who's who wrote this letter saying Elon Musk's behavior was unacceptable and the company should call him out on it. Then found themselves out of a job, and the following day around twenty engineers had to attend a meeting in which a Tesla VP named John Edwards allegedly equated the letter to an quote unquote extremist act. That loyalty pledged thing I mentioned about Twitter seems to apply to Musk's other operations, I guess anyway. Some of these employees say that the letter ultimately led to nine people getting fired from SpaceX. Eight of them have now joined in an effort with the National Labor Relations Board or in l RB to bring unfair labor practices charges against SpaceX. Moreover, this issue seems to add to this this perception that Elon Musk very much does not like having his authority questioned or restricted in any way. It's not a good look. Is kind of authoritarian in its approach, and again, like having someone being very flippant about a sexual harassment lawsuit being dismissed doesn't come across great either. Anyway. That's all the Twitter slash Elon Musk stuff I have for now, So that's good. When we come back. We'll move on to totally different tech news. We're back. Sir Christopher Home, a man who came from humble beginnings to rise to billionaire in the world of financial trading, has some stern words for Google, or specifically Google's parent company, Alphabet. So Hans Hedge Fund, which is called t c I, has a massive steak in Alphabet. It's valued at around six billion dollars billion with a B. And Han recently sent a letter to Alphabet arguing that Alphabet one has too many employees, to it pays its employees way too much, and three it wastes too much money on projects that don't drive revenue and accrew huge losses. So he's calling for Alphabet to downsize and eliminate employee positions that he feels the company has, you know, too many of. He's saying that there are too many people working there and they're not doing enough work. That this is inefficient and costly and should be addressed quickly. Moreover, he wants to see the folks who are at Alphabet make less money, because Alphabet's median salary is somewhere je shy of three hundred thousand dollars a year. That's according to filings with the SEC, which is a big old wow, like the median salaries around three hundred k. Wow. Now, I imagine that doesn't include like contractors and that sort of thing, but still three d k that's a lot of cheddar. And you know, Hans thinks it's too much cheddar, as more cheddar should be going to the billionaires like him. I guess. I mean, I get that Alphabet's compensation is well above that of the competition, but I find it hard to be on the side of a guy who literally has more wealth than most people, including myself, will ever come close to hard to side with the super rich guy, you know. But anyway, he also wants to see subsidiaries like Weymo get the old Google treatment and get shut down. Weymo is Google's self driving vehicle company, and Weymo, he argues, has lost billions of dollars while other car manufacturers have kind of backed off of trying to make autonomous cars reality. He cited some various initiatives that had previously been launched and since abandoned and says Google should do the same thing. So will Alphabet capitulate to his demands? Well, the tech industry as a whole is definitely slimming down due to various economic pressures. Because we're in that ding dang durn economic uncertainty that we still have not really named. I think we're gonna skip recession and go straight to depression personally, but anyway, it would not be surprising to see Alphabet make a move like this. We know that Google has been pulling back on hires and also has started to restrict things like company travel, so it would not be surprising to see Alphabet make that move, especially since we know so many other companies in the tech space are are doing that. In fact, while we're on the topic of layoffs, let's talk Amazon. Just as we're entering the frenzy of the holiday season, though maybe the season will be less of a frenzy due to the aforementioned economic uncertainty, Amazon is following the band and has begun to layoff employees. Some reports suggest that these layoffs could reach around ten thousand jobs total. The company started by laying off employees who are working in the hardware divisions, which produces stuff like Amazon Fire, Amazon Echo, the Kindle, and devices with Amazon's personal assistant, whom I will not name so that you're smart speakers don't talk back at me because they're mean. You should have a discussion with those smart speakers about their behavior. Words can hurt anyway. It's just a super tough time at the big tech companies right now with so many people being let go. And I can speak from experience, it fights to get laid off around Thanksgiving. I had that happened to me at a former job, and even seventeen years later, it still stings. The cuts at Amazon are mostly targeting corporate staff and might amount to around three percent of the total workforce, but the company's warehouse divisions are unlikely to see extensive cuts. That makes sense. We are getting into the holidays, there's going to be a lot of activity in those warehouses, so it makes sense that the cuts were seeing are going to be on the corporate side, not necessarily the warehouse side. CNBC reports that Amazon has sent out a voluntary severance message to some employees, giving them the option to take a severance package and leave the company voluntarily rather than risk being laid off later down the road. Those employees will have until November twenty nine to make their decision, and if they take the package. Their employment with Amazon will end on December twenty three. By the way, I saw that Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder, has dedicated to giving away almost all of his wealth two various charitable organizations and efforts. And I saw that someone had posted clearly he was visited by three spirits, So good on you. I wish I had your name in front of me, because that was a great joke and I really laughed when I saw it. Okay, let's talk about Netflix, and Netflix has announced a change to how subscribers can manage access to various devices. So previously cutting off access revoking access to devices was an all or nothing deal. You could revoke access to all devices you had signed into. Let's say you did something silly like let's say you went to stay at an Airbnb and they had a smart TV, so you logged into your Netflix account and then you left the Airbnb, but you realize you forgot to log out of that smart TV, so your account is still active on there. Well, you could revoke access, but the problem was it applied to every single device you were logged into, so you lost everything, which meant that you had to go through the whole process of getting access again for the stuff you actually own, like say, your own television or whatever. Well, now Netflix is letting users get more granular. You can revoke access to specific devices while you retain it everywhere else. It also gives users the chance to shut down access to their account if, for example, they lent it to say that no good mooture of a cousin of yours or whatever. Maybe I'm projecting anyway, because Netflix will be instituting a sub account charge for users who let other households also access their accounts. This move lets users nope right on out of that by cutting off the access. So instead of Netflix saying, hey, we noticed that this other household is using your account regularly, sometimes at the same time you're using the account, so we're gonna charge you a monthly fee to have this additional uh feed go out, you could say, you know what, I'm just going to revoke that access and I'm good. I'll just pay mine and then they can go and get their own Netflix account. So that is going to be an option to although really Netflix is pointing more at the case I mentioned where you've perhaps traveled somewhere, logged into Netflix, forgot the log out and you wanted to revoke access that way. Anyway, the feature is now live to all Netflix users, and may the odds be ever in your favor. Meta is making some changes to what Facebook users will display in their profiles. Starting on December one, Facebook is going to remove some fields that are currently active in profiles. Those fields include religious views, political views, the interested in field, which in this case the interested in relates to sexual orientation, as well as the address field. All of those are to go away starting December one. Meta has not yet shared what prompted this decision, like, we know what's going to happen, but the company has not yet said why it's made this decision. I think it might be to mitigate issues like harassment that could potentially be part of it, but the company has not said for sure. Ever. Note, the note taking app that burst onto the scene in two thousand eight, announced that the mobile developer company called Bending Spoons will acquire ever note early next year. And Evernote made a pretty big splash when it first debuted, But honestly, I had not heard very much about it over the last several years. Apparently I'm not alone. They kind of fell into semi obscurity. I mean, the people who love every Note continued to love every Note, although from what I understand, the service made some changes that upset a lot of users before backing off of those changes. But this announcement said that this upcoming merger will allow every Note to make quote accelerated improvements across our teams, professional, personal and free offerings, which is fantastic news for lovers of Evernote everywhere end quote. Glad to hear it. I would like to see folks continue to be gainfully employed and be able to work on a on a platform that they really believe in. Also, I want to say, bending spoons is a pretty funny name. Just makes me think of your ee Geller and the Charlatans who claim that they can use psychic powers to bend spoons, when in fact the psychic powers are actually their hands. Okay, enough of my skeptical critique. We're gonna take another quick break. When we come back, we have a couple more news items to get through. Okay, this next story is pretty upsetting. Israel has deployed robotic guns on guard towers in the West Bank. The guns use artificial intelligence to identify and track targets, but are actually fired remotely by guards who are stationed inside these guard towers. So while the guns are using computer assist aiming, kind of like what you see in video games, especially video games that allow players on console to go up against PC gamers, because you know, console controllers don't have the same level of speed and precision as a mouse and keyboard, so often console players get a little aim assist boost where the computer helps guide those crosshairs just a little bit so you can get hits. This AI does effectively the same thing, but to a real world gun, not a video game gun. However, a human being still has to fire the gun, so the guns are outfitted with what Israel refers to as non lethal ammunition, which includes stuff like tear gas and sponge tipped bullets. I think non lethal might be a bit aspirational there. Let's say that they are intended to be non lethal anyway. The location of these guns is around the Palestinian refugee camp, which has led to criticism that Israel is using Palestinians as targets to train its AI, while the Israeli government claims that the guns are there to protect both Israeli and Palestinian lives activist Issa Amro criticized the tech and said that the possibility that could be misused or even hacked, which is terrifying, puts thousands of lives at risk. Even if it's never hacked. The fact that people could think that such a thing could happen means that you've got this this tool of fear there right Like it's terrifying to think about. So you don't even need the hack to happen for it to already have a negative impact, not to mention that, I think just having a robotic gun as a negative impact on the face of its full stop. Meanwhile, Omar Shakir, a leader at Human Rights Watch, warrens that using AI assisted weapons with a remote ire could put Israel on a slippery slope toward becoming quote a powder keg for human rights abuse end quote. We've seen several robotics companies recently pledged to never develop any sort of weapons systems. But while that's reassuring, we also know that military is around the world, including the United States military, are working hard to do just that, to build robotic platforms for weapons, and that you know we've seen that with drones. I mean, that's one robotic platform that has weapons, but we're seeing it across multiple implementations now, and you can kind of understand why. I mean, there's this desire to create weapons that keep your own soldiers out of harm's way. Right this way, you're not putting your soldiers lives at risk. But critics really fear that a use and implementation of robotic platforms will lead to more conflicts around the world. There will be less resistance to getting into armed conflicts if you're thinking that your side doesn't really risk any losses, and that can see widespread human rights crises as a result, which is the big reason why I'm dead set against robotic weapons platforms. Intel launched a new product called fake Catcher, which is designed to detect deep fake videos. Now. According to Intel, fake Catcher has a nineties accuracy rate in detecting deep fakes. The product looks for tail tale signs of face and landmark manipulations, you know, movements that might be too subtle for humans to really pick up on, but that indicate a computer generated the image or video. It even looks for really small indicators like how our veins change color as our hearts pump blood through them, which is kind of creepy. And there's a growing concern over how deep fakes could be used to push misinformation campaigns or to smear someone by posting fake content of them. And of course there's also the terrible world of deep fake adult content, where innocent people have had their images used in this kind of adult content without their consent, and that can lead to really harmful situations, everything from uh, you know, professional impact to mental and emotional trauma. So it is important that we have tools developed that are good at detecting deep fix Of course, the flip side of that is that we often see this as a seesaw kind of approach. Right. As tools get better at detecting deep fakes, deep fakes get better at evading tools, and the process continues. Activision Blizzard will be suspending several online games in China due to a failure to reach a licensing deal with Chinese game company net Ease. So let's break this down really quickly. Net Ease is a game's publisher and distributor in China. Blizzard has partnered with net Ease to bring certain titles like World of Warcraft, over Watch two, Diablo three, and more to the Chinese market, but this lie something. Agreement expires every so often and then comes up for renegotiation, and apparently the most recent negotiation talks broke down as Blizzard failed to reach an agreement for certain titles. Other ones will remain unaffected because they're under separate agreements. So after January twenty three, games that include World of Warcraft, Overwatch two, Diablow three, Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, StarCraft, and Warcraft three Reforged will become unavailable in China. Other titles like Diablow Immortal will continue development in China because, as I said, they were part of a separate deal that was already signed. Apparently, some of the obstacles blocking this deal centered around not distribution, but the ownership of intellectual property and and player data. So Blizzard says it's working to find alternatives to bring titles back to Chinese players, but there's no telling on when or if that will happen. Microsoft has made a move that will likely send at least some corporate leaders to throw a tantrum. The company has introduced games in its Microsoft Teams product in an app called Games for Work. So the games include a bunch of casual titles, stuff like mind Sweeper, Solitaire, that sort of stuff. But they also have multiplayer capability, so it allows employees to match up against their coworkers in various games. So you can go up against someone else in a game of Solitaire to the death. Okay, I got a little carried away. It's probably not to the death. Microsoft says that their data shows employees who play games together for forty five minutes are then more productive than those who engage in other team building activities. But based on how some bosses, particularly in the tech space, seemed to be obsessed with monitoring employees, I can't see this going over well at a lot of places. Nope, work is supposed to be oppressive and joy list, so forget about games. Maybe I'm just projecting now. To be clear, I'm being facetious. I still work remotely. I have not been pressured to return to the office, and as long as I keep regular hours, everything's pretty cool for me. But I realized that my situation is kind of an outlier in the tech space, and that stinks. I think tons of companies actually really benefited from employees working remotely with more autonomy. Anyway, the game's app is available now, and Microsoft says it will soon be updating the service with more features and more games. So maybe you'll end up playing games on Microsoft Teams with teammates occasionally when you're taking a break, which sounds kind of cool to me. Finally, Upside Foods has received pre market consultation approval from the Food and Drug Administration in the U s a k A the f d A. And why the heck am I covering a food story in tech stuff? Well, Upside food makes chicken. Like. This company doesn't butcher chickens and then sell the meat. It makes chicken meat. That's right. Upside Foods is a company that makes lab grown meat, meaning the company harvests animal cells but doesn't slaughter the animals, and it cultivates those cells and bioreactors to make lab grown meat. The FDA approval is an important step towards bringing this product to market, though there are several other steps that have to happen. First. For one thing, the lab will require an inspection from the United States Department of Agriculture a k the U S d A, and then the FDA will actually have to inspect the real food produced before it could be sold in the US, so there are other regulatory steps that have to be made, but the f d A pre approval stage is a necessary and important step. Also, Upside Foods will have to take some time to scale up production if it passes all these inspections, it's not going to be able to go into mass production right away. And in fact, the company plans to provide lab grown chicken only to fancy schmancy restaurants when it starts off, so there will definitely be a huge up charge in the beginning because you'll have to travel to some pretty exclusive restaurants to get a bite of Upside chicken. And that makes sense because the process to grow the meat is itself incredibly expensive. In fact, analysts estimate that once it hits market, lab grown meat will be maybe three times or more expensive than your typical butchered meat, and I'm guessing that's gonna be a massive impediment to its adoption. They might be a massive impediment even to get into grocery stores. I don't think most folks can necessarily afford to triple the amount of money they spend on meat, even if they are comforted by the idea that no animal died to provide that meat, So I imagine this kind of gradual rollout is one that can lead to reductions and production cost over time. Personally, I'm all for the lab grown approach. I you think that it's going to take time to perfect it so that things like taste and consistency are really on par with what you would get if you were buying fresh meat. But the idea of being able to do that without harming animals, and also being able to scale back the livestock industry, which is a huge environmental impact on our world right. If we're able to scale that back significantly, that would be a huge, huge wind as far as fighting against climate change. So there are multiple reasons to really be on board with lab grown meat. Um, but it's gonna take a while for us to get to a point where it becomes cost effective. When it starts off, it's gonna be so prohibitively expensive that only super fancy pants people are going to get a chance to try it. Um. If a fancy pants restaurant that serves lab grown meat wants to invite me to try some, I'm happy to do it. I just can't you know, I can't take out a loan to have an appetizer. All right, That wraps up this episode of tech Stuff News. If you would like to get in touch with me, tell me about something you would like me to cover in the future. You can do that in a couple of different ways. One is to download the I Heart Radio app. It is free to download, free to use. You can just navigate over to tech Stuff by putting that into the search bar. You'll see tech Stuff pop up. There will be a little microphone icon there. If you click on that, you can leave a voice message up to thirty seconds in length. If you like, you can let me know and I can use that that voice message in a future episode. That'd be great. If you don't want me to just you know, you don't have to tell me you just leave a message. I'm never going to include a message unless I'm expressly told that I can, or if you prefer, you can reach out to me on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,