Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey thereon Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for the week ending on Friday the thirteenth in December of twenty twenty four. So let's start off with something kind of spooky for Friday the thirteenth. Apparently, for a few weeks now, folks in New Jersey have been reporting strange aircraft flying overhead, particularly along coastal regions. Most of the reports have referred to the aircraft as drones, though various authorities have said that at least in some of these cases, that's a misidentification. They say that many of these reports are actually about your run of the mill manned aircraft, just plane planes, so to speak. But numerous citizens have said there have been many instances of drones flying overhead, and we're talking like big ones, not your little bitty quad copters, but much larger drones. And no one has really come forward with an official explanation as to what's going on or who's behind it. And when there's a lack of information, there will always be a surplus of speculation. We humans don't like to have big, unanswered questions, right, So if we don't have an answer, sometimes we just invent one. And that includes one claim that the drones launch from an Iranian mothership. That's a story that US Representative Jeff Van Drew said to Fox News, though later he clarified that he's actually seen no concrete evidence tying any drone activity in New Jersey to Iran, so maybe it's not an Iranian mothership after all. According to various news outlets, most of the reports, like I said, have come along the coastal areas of New Jersey, though there have been reports of them coming as far inland as parts of Pennsylvania. The FBI is asking people to send in videos and photos of these drones in action in an attempt to suss out what might be going on, if there is something going on, because it's always possible that it's not like, it's possible that this is all about misidentification and a few, you know, completely innocent cases of people just operating drones that aren't at all malicious or malevolent. Officials have said repeatedly that there's no evidence that the drones are any kind of credible threat, and there's no evidence tying them to any foreign powers, so they are not suspected to be under foreign control. However, with this ongoing lack of information, that hasn't stopped people from saying exactly the opposite, and I honestly don't know what's going on. My guess is knowing how humans behave. The explanations or lack thereof that the officials have given so far are not going to satisfy people, and speculation will just continue to grow over the coming days. Generally, when these sort of things happen, I typically see this culminating in one of two ways. Either we eventually do figure out what's happening, whether that's some sort of concentrated effort to have drones fly over New Jersey for one reason or another, or it eventually will just kind of fade away and people will forget about it. That's it, Like, I don't think there's anything else that comes of this. Also, just to remind folks, the way the US regulates drone use here is typically tied to drone weight, So if a drone weighs less than fifty five pounds, then you can operate it with fewer restrictions and regulations. Although you are supposed to have like an identifier tag, a digital tag that links the drone to you, like that you are the authorized operator of that drone. When you get above fifty five pounds, then a lot more strict regulations come into play. But that being said, while larger drones do weigh more than smaller ones, there's also been a lot of advancements made in lightweight materials like carbon fiber that have allowed for larger drones that surprisingly don't weigh that much. So I don't know what's going on here, but I do know that it's been going on long enough that it's become national news for a while. Apparently it was just news in New Jersey and hadn't really gone much further than that. This is the first I've heard of it, so we'll see where it goes from here, if it goes anywhere. Matt Novak of Gizmoto has a piece titled Trump's pick for FTC chair is ready to undo the good things from Lena Kahn, and I think it's well worth a read. So a lot of what is said in the article isn't exactly a surprise. If you know how US politics work. Every time there's a change in administrations and someone's tenure is up, departments like the FTC are affected. Even if the new president is from the exact same party as the outgoing president, you can expect things to shake up a bit. But obviously it's more dramatic when there's a shift in power dynamics between Democrat and Republican leaders. So this is an overwhelmingly Republican administration that's coming in next year. And in this case, Trump's pick is a guy named Andrew Ferguson, who is already on the FTC. He's part of the commission already, he was appointed under Joe Biden. So the way the FTC works is there are five members of the Commission, and at most three of those members can come from a single political party. And since in the United States we effectively just have two political parties, I mean there are others, but they represent such a small slice that you really just talk about two Republican and Democrat, it means, in effect you get three from one to two from the other. Novak says that Ferguson is poised to roll back some of the moves the FTC has made over the last few years. So, for example, one of the changes that Lena Kahn's FTC made was to ban non compete clauses. Now, if you've never had one of these hanging over you, let me kind of clue you in. So these clauses are measures that companies put into place in employee agreements, and they state that you're not allowed to work for a competing company for a certain length of time once your employment with your current employer ends. So typically the non compete might be something like six months. So if I were under a non compete like that, I'm not saying I am and I'm not not saying that I'm not or whatever. That was so many negatives. I don't even know where I am now. Anyway, if I had that kind of non compete clause, I would mean that should my employment with iHeart end tomorrow for whatever reason, whether I quit or they lay me off, or whatever it might be, I would not be allowed to seek employment with a company like Spotify for half a year or so, or else risk legal action because I would have violated the non compete clause. Cohn and her fellow Democrat commissioners argued that these clauses are hurtful to employees, which I agree with they are, and they're mostly used by companies as a way to intimidate their employees into staying on board rather than jumping ship to a better opportunity. Let's say that I had risen to a certain level within iHeart, and I had deep knowledge of proprietary information in the company that really, you know, it's part of the trade secrets that let iHeart do what it does. Obviously, there'd be a vested interest in making sure I don't take that information with me when I leave and then give that to the benefit of some other competitor. That would be bad, so you can see it from that level. But more often than not, these non competes get thrown in on positions that just don't have that big of an impact to the overall organization, but it has an enormous impact to the individual, right like iHeart. If they got rid of me, I'm sure they would miss me, but they do they'd be fine. I, on the other hand, would be struggling to figure out what the heck I'm going to do if I can't get another job in this field within six months. That would be really tough on me. So the FTC made this big change. And the concern that Novak raises is that the new FTC under Trump's administration is going to start rolling back the protections that the previous administration put in place in order to benefit employees versus businesses. And the thought is that the FTC moving forward is going to be much more friendly with the folks who own and operate businesses and much less less helpful to those who work for them. Will have to see. Meanwhile, big tech companies are lining up in what looks like an attempt to get on Trump's good side. Both Meta and Amazon have contributed the equivalent of a million dollars each to Trump's inaugural fund, as in the money going to his inauguration ceremony. Dana Mattioli and Rebecca Balhause of The Wall Street Journal wrote that Zuckerberg appears to be trying to mend defenses. You know, Trump has long held a rather acrimonious stance against Meta, So why is that? A Couple of reasons. One is he got banned from Meta's Facebook platform after the whole January sixth debacle several years back. Another is that he has long maintained that various online platforms, including stuff like Google and Facebook, have long held an anti conservative bias and actively suppressed free speech. And seeing how folks like Zuckerberg and Bezos are accustomed to accumulating vast amounts of wealth, they appear to be taking steps to keep that trend going strong and not inviting Trump to make things harder for them. Meanwhile, Amazon's going to carry the inauguration ceremonies on Amazon Prime Video, and I expect we're going to see a lot more moves from leaders and big tech companies that are similar to this in an effort to avoid Trump's rather mercurial wrath. Speaking of that, TikTok's clock is running mighty low here in the United States. Now. You could recall that earlier this year, Congress passed a law that would require TikTok's parent company, Bye Dance to divest itself of TikTok or else face a nationwide ban on the app. Bye Dance being a Chinese company, and the worry here is that TikTok could just be a siphon for information that could go direct to China. So anyway, TikTok has been fighting this law ever since and challenged it in court by arguing that it goes against the First Amendment, the right of free speech. But a court found otherwise, and an appeal panel has agreed, which is not a good sign for TikTok. The agreement comes down to a few things. One, the judicial system in the United States traditionally is reluctant to contradict Congress, particularly in matters that involve national security, and that, of course, is how the TikTok ban has been framed, so that's one potential reason why the court was reluctant to overturn this. Secondly, the court has found that TikTok could operate in the United States without issue if byte Edance actually divested itself of the company. So, in other words, the court has essentially said there's no freedom of speech issue here because TikTok has a solution to this problem. Just separate from the Chinese parent company and you can continue as per usual. TikTok has appealed to the Supreme Court, but there are doubts that the highest court in the United States will hear the case, which means they'll just have to abide by the rulings of the lower courts. TikTok has also filed an emergency request to delay the law's effects until the Supreme Court can weigh in and until the Trump administry can say something about it. And the US government opposes this move, So we haven't seen how this is going to turn out yet. The ban is scheduled to begin on January nineteenth, one day before Trump's inauguration, so time is running out. Interestingly, during Trump's first term as president, he led the charge on banning TikTok. He's the one who brought it up. He even passed an executive order demanding TikTok separate from Byteedance, but that order was never enforced. During his campaign, however, Trump appeared to have reversed his decision because, well, he said, it's because lots of people like to use the app, which I mean, that's true, But I don't see how that actually addresses the supposed risk to national security that he was concerned about a few years earlier. All I'm saying is that Trump changes his mind a lot, and if he had said something like upon further reflection, I determined that there's no risk to national security, at least I think his decision to reverse his stance would make more sense. But honestly, I think the real reason he reversed his stance, at least during the campaign, is that one of his big campaign donors also happened to be someone who is heavily invested in byte dance and TikTok so in order to keep those dollars coming into his campaign. This is my opinion. Trump said whatever he thought would get him that money, and now since he's gotten what he wanted that he got elected president, I don't know that he's so concerned about it. We'll see. I don't know if he's going to follow through. All Right, We've got a lot more news to cover before we get to that, though. Let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. Okay, we're back, and we're switching gears away from politics, for which I am thankful. So let's talk about Google's latest push into the world of mixed reality. Kevin Party of Ours Technica has a piece about this. It's titled Google steps into extended Reality again with Android XR. I had not heard the term extended reality before. I've heard mixed reality, I've heard augmented, I've heard virtual, extended as a new one for me, or if it's not new, I hadn't I didn't remember it. But some of y'all might recall that years ago Google really got things moving in the AR space, at least as far as the general tech consumer is concerned, when they launched Google Glass. Now, to be clear, Google Glass was not the first example of augmented reality, not by far. It was just an early example of a technology that was somewhat consumer facing. Now, I say somewhat because Google Glass was really limited upon release. It was very expensive. I think it was like fifteen hundred dollars for one of those sets, and it never really evolved beyond that very limited run for the average consumer. It did become an enterprise tool for some companies, but that and it kind of found a place there at least I think until twenty twenty three, but it hasn't really had a larger impact. Now, Google is promoting a mixed reality platform that's built upon the Android operating system that's best known for the operating system for mobile devices. Party writes that Samsung will be coming out with a mixed reality headset built on Android XR at some point next year. Currently, it's known as project Mouhan, though I'm sure it's going to have a very different name by the time it's an actual product. Google's video that promotes the Android XR project is a little light on details, but it indicates that users should expect to be able to tap into features found in other existing Google products, such as like Google Lens or you know, auto translation tools and maps and that kind of thing. I honestly don't know if there really is a market for XR headsets. You know. I know that Meta has been offering ar light glasses for quite some time now. You can get you know, those those Meta ray bands or whatever, and those are popular with some folks. I don't know, you know how large that customer base is. And of course, Apple came out with the Vision Pro early this year, but the lack of support for that platform suggests to me that Apple at the very least is backing off on pushing AR headsets for a while. Maybe they won't totally end development, but I imagine it's no longer a priority because while everyone who tried the Apple Vision Pro said they were pretty impressed by it, it just didn't have the splash needed to establish a foundation for Apple to really build upon and the lack of ongoing interest from the general public. I think then translated to Apple's own lack of interest in supporting it. So yeah, I don't know if Google's going to crack the nut on consumer mixed reality. Maybe we'll see, But I mean Google has been instrumental in releasing tons and tons and tons of different products that received middling to low success rates, and then those elements would get engulfed into other Google efforts and whatever it was that was launched would just disappear. So I guess what I'm saying is that when these mixed reality headsets hit the market, be cautious before adopting it, because Google has a very long history of abandoning stuff not long after launch, so that's not necessarily going to be the case here. I'm just saying, if it's going to be really expensive and you don't necessarily have the money to spare, maybe hold back for generation two or three, just to make sure that it's going to stick around. Emmanuel Meberg of four h four Media has an article titled YouTube enhances comment section with AI generated nonsense, and y'all, I just can't. I mean, YouTube's comment section is already a breeding ground for nonsense. Now, don't get me wrong, there are actually some great community members out there in various communities who post positive and supportive and helpful comments. There are others who might be a little more abrasive, but they clearly mean well in their criticism. Then there's the ones who don't mean well in their criticisms, and then the outright jokesters and trolls. The jokesters just want an opportunity to crack a punchline and work on their material, and the trolls just want to upset whomever they can. And then you've got like stalkers who are fostering unhealthy parasocial relationships online. And then you've got bots that are just trying to trick people into going to malicious or shady websites. Do we really need to add more AI to this mix? Who? Apparently, YouTube's answer is yes. Now, in this case, the AI is actually intended to give content creators the ability to interact with, or at least to appear to interact with their communities without as much effort. It's meant to let creators reply to comments faster and easier, But, as my Berg writes, the results aren't always helpful. In fact, in his words, they sometimes can end up being quote misleading, nonsensical, or weirdly intimate end quote. Now, this tool is not fully automated. It's not like it just automatically goes and starts answering every comment left on a creator's channel. Instead, it sort of auto suggests a reply, and if the reply is one that the content creator likes, they can just post it. So that's pretty good, right. It gives the creator the ultimate editorial control to whether you know, they post it or just write their own response. It's kind of like the auto messages that are generated by a lot of different texting or messaging apps these days. I suggest reading My Bird's piece for a full rundown on the topic, as it includes some amusing examples of how the AI suggested replies that maybe just aren't the best fit for the comments that were left behind. Brandon Viiglia Rollo of The Register has a headline that definitely caught my attention this week. The headline is America cops are using AI to draft police reports and the ACLU isn't happy. So police officers cops they have to write up reports detailing their work they have to document everything that they're doing when it relates to their interactions with the public and pursuing suspects and all that stuff. They have to report everything because all of those details matter, particularly once an issue reaches the court system, where prosecutors are reliant upon these reports in order to make their case. Now, once upon a time, many many many years ago, one of my first jobs was to transcribe similar reports. Now I had to take handwritten reports, and then I would have to type those reports up. This was for a security firm. It was not a police station. It was a police force. But several members of the security team were either active cops or former cops and they were moonlighting as security officers. And y'all to say those reports were often incomprehensible is being too generous. Not all police officers are gifted with the ability to write a clear, concise report. Some of those reports they might as well have been gibberished. Now, granted, I was working again for a security firm, not for a police station, so it could have been different because of that. But anyway, I can see why police forces might wish to experiment with a tool that makes writing reports a lot easier to do and easier to understand and reference, you know, easier to follow. Like some of those reports, I would type literally what had been written, but I couldn't tell you what the report was actually saying, because it wasn't written in a way that followed a clear line of thought, at least not from my perspective. But there's an understandable concern that an automated approach to generating reports could result in documentation that's treated as official but as fundamentally incorrect, misleading, or militia, even if it's not intentionally malicious. The technology that viglia Rollo alludes to is called Draft one. It's from a company called Axon. So this technology takes footage captured by body cameras that are warned by police officers, and it then generates reports based off that footage. Cops then have the ability to edit these reports, and so they can go in and correct any mistakes that might be in the generated report. They might elaborate on points that weren't captured by the camera or the AI tool. But the ACLU has pointed out that offloading reports to AI reports that again prosecutors rely upon during criminal trials that's inevitably going to lead to civil rights violations and related issues, and I think that's a pretty safe bet that there will be these negative consequences. I mean, we've already talked multiple times on this show about how certain technologies, such as facial recognition algorithms, frequently have massive blind spots that disproportionately affect already vulnerable populations. So in the case with facial recognition tools, if you're not a white male, the success rate for those tools begins to fall, and you know, depending upon what demographic you fall into, you could end up being the victim of a false positive or a false negative. I mean, it's proven to be an unreliable technology because of the inherent bias that underlies the tech. Not saying that the tech can't get to a point where it could reliably identify people, but as it has been trained and designed, it doesn't for certain populations. And often these are the same populations that are disproportionately criminalized. And to get into that gets into a whole sociology thing that goes so far beyond tech. So we're not going to do that. I'm just saying tools like this can add to those problems. And make them worse. So well, the ACLU is urging that police not use this tool. That in fact, municipalities end up banning the use of AI generated police reports because of the potential harm it can have on innocent citizens or just citizens in general, Like it can violate your rights, and that's something that is not supposed to happen and yet does a lot. So let's not make the problem worse. It's what the ACLU is saying. As viglia Rolo points out, the company behind this I mentioned them once before, Axon already has a pretty rough reputation. So a couple of years ago, Axon proposed the brilliant idea of attaching tasers to remote controlled drones for the purposes of law enforcement. So you would have like taser armed flying drones that some police officer using a remote control could operate and then zap people with. Not very long after the company made that announcement, their entire or nearly their entire ethics board resigned in protest. Like when you've got an ethics board and they're like, oh, for heaven's sake, this is so clearly not ethical, what are we even doing here? And then they just they leave, don't even bother to shut the door on the way out. That is sending a pretty strong message. Now, in that case, Axon did back away from that particular project, so we don't have those taser armed drones flying around, for which I am thankful. I highly recommend the article and the register if you want to learn more about this. Again. That's by Brandon viglia Rolo and the article title is American cops are using AI to draft police reports and the ACLU isn't happy. All right, let's take another quick break. When we come back, I got a couple more news items I want to talk about, and we'll be right back. Okay. Next up, we have a story from Avrum Pilch of Tom's Hardware. Tom's Hardware is a great resource, by the way, I don't know if you've ever used it. I highly recommend it. I mean I used to use Tom's Hardware just to literally get my hands on certain electronic pieces and that kind of stuff. But there's a ton of great articles on there too. Anyway. Pilch's article on Tom's Hardware is titled Microsoft recall screenshots, credit cards and Social Security numbers. Even with the sensitive Information filter enabled, Okay, that's a little hard for me to parse the way I said it. Essentially, what they're talking about here, what Pilch is saying is that Microsoft Recall, which is a feature in certain new Windows eleven laptops, the Copilot plus PCs. Essentially it has some blind spots, some issues that probably need to be a if you don't recall Microsoft recall. I love how I changed my pronunciation, just depending on how I feel anyway. It's a feature that's in recent PCs in which the computer takes screenshots of whatever it is you're doing on the device, and it just keeps a record of these screenshots. Then you can actually search those screenshots to find information. And you might say, well, what good does that do. Well, let's say you are doing something that you very rarely have to do, Like it's a task that you have to do once in a blue moon, so every time you do it, you have to relearn how to do it because you're not doing it every day. Well, this could help you quickly go back and retrace your steps and say, ah, here, that's what I need to do in order to complete this task. I just you know, search my screen shots and I found out what I need to do, and I'm good to go. And Microsoft had introduced this or announced this earlier this year, but that initial announcement did a lot of people to voice concerns about the feature, specifically concerns about security and privacy. People didn't like the idea of their activities on the computer becoming like a record, a searchable record, for lots of reasons. I think you can probably imagine there are a lot of legitimate reasons why you wouldn't want to have like a searchable record of your activities on your computer. For example, let's say that you were researching something like divorce, like maybe you're in an unhappy relationship, you wouldn't necessarily want that to be a searchable record on your computer. Or maybe you're researching something about a health issue and that's not anyone else's business, so you don't want that to be searchable. There are a lot of legitimate and innocent reasons why you wouldn't want to have a full record of your activities just sitting there on your computer. But let's say that you did come around to saying, okay, well this is more helpful than harmful. I definitely want to make sure that and Microsoft assured people that the recall feature exists solely at the device level. In other words, it's not sending information over the cloud to Microsoft or to other partners. It all lives on the machine. So that way, as long as the machine is in your possession, you're good. But that's still kind of a concern because if someone were to get access to your machine, then they would be able to see a full history of your activities that might include stuff that gives them information about logins and all that other kind of information. So then Microsoft said, Okay, we're gonna work on this. They kind of pushed back the debut of recall, and then they incorporated a couple of new features. One is that the screenshots are all encrypted, which means if you don't have administrative access to the computer or whatever, or user access, like you don't have the password to get into someone's machine, you can't do anything with those files unless you first decrypt them. Presumably that would take a very long time to do and wouldn't be worth your effort. But as Pilch notes, sometimes recall will capture sensitive information that it should not capture in a screenshot and will leave it in plain text. Although the screenshot itself is encrypted, if you were to look at the screenshot, you would see the information that shouldn't be protected in clear text. That's a problem. So for example, credit card information. By default, screenshots are not supposed to be taken of that kind of info. And if you're using like a shopping site, Recalls pretty good about not doing that. But Pilch found that if you were using other cases, like let's say you've got a PDF file and you open up the PDF file and you're filling out the fields on this PDF file, they've made it, you know, editable, so you might have a file that has government information on it, like if you were filing for a passport or something. He found that in those cases, Recall would take screenshots and the sensitive information would be clearly viewable in the screenshots, and that's an issue. Again. The screenshot itself is encrypted and it lives just on the device, but still a concern like there's this record there that doesn't necessarily need to be there. Microsoft says that it's continually working on its features, so maybe this will be something that gets patched out later on, but I think it's good to be alert and aware about these sorts of things. So every country in the world has rules around certain bands of radio frequencies and how those bands can be used. So here in the United States, the Federal Communications Commission or FCC oversees this, and recently they opened up a frequency band, the six gigahertz frequency band. In fact that the band itself is like one point two gigaherts wide. But they've opened this up to very low power devices. So this doesn't apply to anyone who perhaps wanted to build a mega transmitter in the six gigahertz band or anything like that. There's still not a lot to do that. However, it does allow for short range wireless devices, so for example, in car entertainment systems or short range health monitoring devices, those kinds of things, Internet of things kind of applications. The data throughput in the six gigahertz range is far greater than what you would get with the technology like Bluetooth. But that just means that the implementation of the technology should guide your choice as to which technology, which wireless technology you incorporate into your invention. So if whatever application you have in mind just requires small amounts of data transfers like it's just little packets of data. Bluetooth would be a great solution for that. It's it does that job great, But if you need something that has a bit more oomph in the data transmission context, well then you would probably want to use this band of frequencies. One other issue with this is that you could run into interfer appearence. That's why the FCC has only allowed for very low power applications using this band because if it's very low power, the range of transmission is not going to be very far, so the chance for interference is lower. If you have higher power outputs, then you're going to have more opportunities for interference, which means more error rates and things of that nature. So if you just restrict how much power the device is able to use, you really sidestep that problem just because they don't transmit far enough for interference to typically be an issue. Okay, our last story before we get to recommended reading is about the game awards that happened this week. Now I'm going to cut right to the chase. The Game of the Year went to Astrobot. I have not played Astrobot, but everything I've heard suggests that it is worthy of the title of Game of the Year, even though I'm a little salty that like a dragon Infinite Wealth didn't make it to the nominee list for a Game of the Year. But then I play maybe three or four games in a twelve month period, so I don't have the experience to make a good call on these kinds of things, Like I am certainly not an expert because I don't play enough. But anyway, the Game Awards are really known for two things, you know, giving out trophies to games and creators and also showing a buttload of trailers for upcoming video game titles. So some of the stuff shown off during the awards included a teaser for a game from Naughty Dog. They make the uncharted games. It's titled Intergalactic the Heretic Project. They showed a trailer for an elden Ring multiplayer spinoff game called night Rain. They showed off a trailer for a new entry in the Venerable Witcher series of games, so this would be the Witcher four. They gave a first look at the upcoming Borderlands four game. They announced a new Turrok game of all things that was a shock and lots more stuff too, So if you are a gamer, and somehow you missed out on all the hype and all the announcements. I recommend you take some time today to watch a truckload of trailers and catch up and get excited for what's coming next year. I'll have to say, like the last couple of years have been pretty darn phenomenal on the video game front. There have been some really incredible titles to come out, and while I've only had a chance to play a few of them, I'm just amazed at the creativity and the innovation that's going on in the video game space, mostly in the independent space, like the TRIPAA titles and stuff. Those are always, you know, impressive and everything. And I'd be lying if I said I wasn't looking forward to Grand Theft Auto six. I am, But honestly, I think some of the most exciting developments in the video game space have been in the independent area. There've been some great games. No independent itself is a broad spectrum. Some independent studios are teeny tiny and consist of maybe one or two people, and some independent studios are actually quite large and have support from much bigger companies somewhere along the line. So you know, that's a huge range in itself. Okay, I do have some recommended reading for y'all, and this stuff is pretty deep and some of it's super heavy, So I didn't tackle it in today's episode because typically the entries here are fairly short, and I feel like these are stories that require a lot more reading and consideration and you can't easily summarize them. So up first is Ian Sample's piece in The Guardian titled unprecedented risk to life on Earth Scientists call for halt on mirror life MicroB research, you know, in case those drones over New Jersey aren't filling you with enough existential dread, but a very important piece just scary. Then there's Dan Gooden's peace in Ours Tetnica titled Russia takes unusual route to hack Starlink connected devices in Ukraine and it details the rather circuitous route that Russia has created in an effort to spy on Ukrainian forces in that war. And finally there's Ashley Bellinger's piece, also in Ours Technica that's titled character dot AI steps up teen safety after bots allegedly caused suicide self harm. So yeah, that last article in particular is very hard to read It does deal with kids and mental health issues and suicide, but I think it's important to stay informed about how interactions with AI can have very real and sometimes extremely tragic consequences in our world, and to learn more about what companies are doing or not doing to address those issues. That's it for this episode. It was a long news episode, but you know, we're wrapping up the year. There's a lot to talk about, and besides which I won't be doing this much longer, so it's good to get it all out now. I hope all of you out there are doing really well. I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey thereon Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for the week ending on Friday the thirteenth in December of twenty twenty four. So let's start off with something kind of spooky for Friday the thirteenth. Apparently, for a few weeks now, folks in New Jersey have been reporting strange aircraft flying overhead, particularly along coastal regions. Most of the reports have referred to the aircraft as drones, though various authorities have said that at least in some of these cases, that's a misidentification. They say that many of these reports are actually about your run of the mill manned aircraft, just plane planes, so to speak. But numerous citizens have said there have been many instances of drones flying overhead, and we're talking like big ones, not your little bitty quad copters, but much larger drones. And no one has really come forward with an official explanation as to what's going on or who's behind it. And when there's a lack of information, there will always be a surplus of speculation. We humans don't like to have big, unanswered questions, right, So if we don't have an answer, sometimes we just invent one. And that includes one claim that the drones launch from an Iranian mothership. That's a story that US Representative Jeff Van Drew said to Fox News, though later he clarified that he's actually seen no concrete evidence tying any drone activity in New Jersey to Iran, so maybe it's not an Iranian mothership after all. According to various news outlets, most of the reports, like I said, have come along the coastal areas of New Jersey, though there have been reports of them coming as far inland as parts of Pennsylvania. The FBI is asking people to send in videos and photos of these drones in action in an attempt to suss out what might be going on, if there is something going on, because it's always possible that it's not like, it's possible that this is all about misidentification and a few, you know, completely innocent cases of people just operating drones that aren't at all malicious or malevolent. Officials have said repeatedly that there's no evidence that the drones are any kind of credible threat, and there's no evidence tying them to any foreign powers, so they are not suspected to be under foreign control. However, with this ongoing lack of information, that hasn't stopped people from saying exactly the opposite, and I honestly don't know what's going on. My guess is knowing how humans behave. The explanations or lack thereof that the officials have given so far are not going to satisfy people, and speculation will just continue to grow over the coming days. Generally, when these sort of things happen, I typically see this culminating in one of two ways. Either we eventually do figure out what's happening, whether that's some sort of concentrated effort to have drones fly over New Jersey for one reason or another, or it eventually will just kind of fade away and people will forget about it. That's it, Like, I don't think there's anything else that comes of this. Also, just to remind folks, the way the US regulates drone use here is typically tied to drone weight, So if a drone weighs less than fifty five pounds, then you can operate it with fewer restrictions and regulations. Although you are supposed to have like an identifier tag, a digital tag that links the drone to you, like that you are the authorized operator of that drone. When you get above fifty five pounds, then a lot more strict regulations come into play. But that being said, while larger drones do weigh more than smaller ones, there's also been a lot of advancements made in lightweight materials like carbon fiber that have allowed for larger drones that surprisingly don't weigh that much. So I don't know what's going on here, but I do know that it's been going on long enough that it's become national news for a while. Apparently it was just news in New Jersey and hadn't really gone much further than that. This is the first I've heard of it, so we'll see where it goes from here, if it goes anywhere. Matt Novak of Gizmoto has a piece titled Trump's pick for FTC chair is ready to undo the good things from Lena Kahn, and I think it's well worth a read. So a lot of what is said in the article isn't exactly a surprise. If you know how US politics work. Every time there's a change in administrations and someone's tenure is up, departments like the FTC are affected. Even if the new president is from the exact same party as the outgoing president, you can expect things to shake up a bit. But obviously it's more dramatic when there's a shift in power dynamics between Democrat and Republican leaders. So this is an overwhelmingly Republican administration that's coming in next year. And in this case, Trump's pick is a guy named Andrew Ferguson, who is already on the FTC. He's part of the commission already, he was appointed under Joe Biden. So the way the FTC works is there are five members of the Commission, and at most three of those members can come from a single political party. And since in the United States we effectively just have two political parties, I mean there are others, but they represent such a small slice that you really just talk about two Republican and Democrat, it means, in effect you get three from one to two from the other. Novak says that Ferguson is poised to roll back some of the moves the FTC has made over the last few years. So, for example, one of the changes that Lena Kahn's FTC made was to ban non compete clauses. Now, if you've never had one of these hanging over you, let me kind of clue you in. So these clauses are measures that companies put into place in employee agreements, and they state that you're not allowed to work for a competing company for a certain length of time once your employment with your current employer ends. So typically the non compete might be something like six months. So if I were under a non compete like that, I'm not saying I am and I'm not not saying that I'm not or whatever. That was so many negatives. I don't even know where I am now. Anyway, if I had that kind of non compete clause, I would mean that should my employment with iHeart end tomorrow for whatever reason, whether I quit or they lay me off, or whatever it might be, I would not be allowed to seek employment with a company like Spotify for half a year or so, or else risk legal action because I would have violated the non compete clause. Cohn and her fellow Democrat commissioners argued that these clauses are hurtful to employees, which I agree with they are, and they're mostly used by companies as a way to intimidate their employees into staying on board rather than jumping ship to a better opportunity. Let's say that I had risen to a certain level within iHeart, and I had deep knowledge of proprietary information in the company that really, you know, it's part of the trade secrets that let iHeart do what it does. Obviously, there'd be a vested interest in making sure I don't take that information with me when I leave and then give that to the benefit of some other competitor. That would be bad, so you can see it from that level. But more often than not, these non competes get thrown in on positions that just don't have that big of an impact to the overall organization, but it has an enormous impact to the individual, right like iHeart. If they got rid of me, I'm sure they would miss me, but they do they'd be fine. I, on the other hand, would be struggling to figure out what the heck I'm going to do if I can't get another job in this field within six months. That would be really tough on me. So the FTC made this big change. And the concern that Novak raises is that the new FTC under Trump's administration is going to start rolling back the protections that the previous administration put in place in order to benefit employees versus businesses. And the thought is that the FTC moving forward is going to be much more friendly with the folks who own and operate businesses and much less less helpful to those who work for them. Will have to see. Meanwhile, big tech companies are lining up in what looks like an attempt to get on Trump's good side. Both Meta and Amazon have contributed the equivalent of a million dollars each to Trump's inaugural fund, as in the money going to his inauguration ceremony. Dana Mattioli and Rebecca Balhause of The Wall Street Journal wrote that Zuckerberg appears to be trying to mend defenses. You know, Trump has long held a rather acrimonious stance against Meta, So why is that? A Couple of reasons. One is he got banned from Meta's Facebook platform after the whole January sixth debacle several years back. Another is that he has long maintained that various online platforms, including stuff like Google and Facebook, have long held an anti conservative bias and actively suppressed free speech. And seeing how folks like Zuckerberg and Bezos are accustomed to accumulating vast amounts of wealth, they appear to be taking steps to keep that trend going strong and not inviting Trump to make things harder for them. Meanwhile, Amazon's going to carry the inauguration ceremonies on Amazon Prime Video, and I expect we're going to see a lot more moves from leaders and big tech companies that are similar to this in an effort to avoid Trump's rather mercurial wrath. Speaking of that, TikTok's clock is running mighty low here in the United States. Now. You could recall that earlier this year, Congress passed a law that would require TikTok's parent company, Bye Dance to divest itself of TikTok or else face a nationwide ban on the app. Bye Dance being a Chinese company, and the worry here is that TikTok could just be a siphon for information that could go direct to China. So anyway, TikTok has been fighting this law ever since and challenged it in court by arguing that it goes against the First Amendment, the right of free speech. But a court found otherwise, and an appeal panel has agreed, which is not a good sign for TikTok. The agreement comes down to a few things. One, the judicial system in the United States traditionally is reluctant to contradict Congress, particularly in matters that involve national security, and that, of course, is how the TikTok ban has been framed, so that's one potential reason why the court was reluctant to overturn this. Secondly, the court has found that TikTok could operate in the United States without issue if byte Edance actually divested itself of the company. So, in other words, the court has essentially said there's no freedom of speech issue here because TikTok has a solution to this problem. Just separate from the Chinese parent company and you can continue as per usual. TikTok has appealed to the Supreme Court, but there are doubts that the highest court in the United States will hear the case, which means they'll just have to abide by the rulings of the lower courts. TikTok has also filed an emergency request to delay the law's effects until the Supreme Court can weigh in and until the Trump administry can say something about it. And the US government opposes this move, So we haven't seen how this is going to turn out yet. The ban is scheduled to begin on January nineteenth, one day before Trump's inauguration, so time is running out. Interestingly, during Trump's first term as president, he led the charge on banning TikTok. He's the one who brought it up. He even passed an executive order demanding TikTok separate from Byteedance, but that order was never enforced. During his campaign, however, Trump appeared to have reversed his decision because, well, he said, it's because lots of people like to use the app, which I mean, that's true, But I don't see how that actually addresses the supposed risk to national security that he was concerned about a few years earlier. All I'm saying is that Trump changes his mind a lot, and if he had said something like upon further reflection, I determined that there's no risk to national security, at least I think his decision to reverse his stance would make more sense. But honestly, I think the real reason he reversed his stance, at least during the campaign, is that one of his big campaign donors also happened to be someone who is heavily invested in byte dance and TikTok so in order to keep those dollars coming into his campaign. This is my opinion. Trump said whatever he thought would get him that money, and now since he's gotten what he wanted that he got elected president, I don't know that he's so concerned about it. We'll see. I don't know if he's going to follow through. All Right, We've got a lot more news to cover before we get to that, though. Let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. Okay, we're back, and we're switching gears away from politics, for which I am thankful. So let's talk about Google's latest push into the world of mixed reality. Kevin Party of Ours Technica has a piece about this. It's titled Google steps into extended Reality again with Android XR. I had not heard the term extended reality before. I've heard mixed reality, I've heard augmented, I've heard virtual, extended as a new one for me, or if it's not new, I hadn't I didn't remember it. But some of y'all might recall that years ago Google really got things moving in the AR space, at least as far as the general tech consumer is concerned, when they launched Google Glass. Now, to be clear, Google Glass was not the first example of augmented reality, not by far. It was just an early example of a technology that was somewhat consumer facing. Now, I say somewhat because Google Glass was really limited upon release. It was very expensive. I think it was like fifteen hundred dollars for one of those sets, and it never really evolved beyond that very limited run for the average consumer. It did become an enterprise tool for some companies, but that and it kind of found a place there at least I think until twenty twenty three, but it hasn't really had a larger impact. Now, Google is promoting a mixed reality platform that's built upon the Android operating system that's best known for the operating system for mobile devices. Party writes that Samsung will be coming out with a mixed reality headset built on Android XR at some point next year. Currently, it's known as project Mouhan, though I'm sure it's going to have a very different name by the time it's an actual product. Google's video that promotes the Android XR project is a little light on details, but it indicates that users should expect to be able to tap into features found in other existing Google products, such as like Google Lens or you know, auto translation tools and maps and that kind of thing. I honestly don't know if there really is a market for XR headsets. You know. I know that Meta has been offering ar light glasses for quite some time now. You can get you know, those those Meta ray bands or whatever, and those are popular with some folks. I don't know, you know how large that customer base is. And of course, Apple came out with the Vision Pro early this year, but the lack of support for that platform suggests to me that Apple at the very least is backing off on pushing AR headsets for a while. Maybe they won't totally end development, but I imagine it's no longer a priority because while everyone who tried the Apple Vision Pro said they were pretty impressed by it, it just didn't have the splash needed to establish a foundation for Apple to really build upon and the lack of ongoing interest from the general public. I think then translated to Apple's own lack of interest in supporting it. So yeah, I don't know if Google's going to crack the nut on consumer mixed reality. Maybe we'll see, But I mean Google has been instrumental in releasing tons and tons and tons of different products that received middling to low success rates, and then those elements would get engulfed into other Google efforts and whatever it was that was launched would just disappear. So I guess what I'm saying is that when these mixed reality headsets hit the market, be cautious before adopting it, because Google has a very long history of abandoning stuff not long after launch, so that's not necessarily going to be the case here. I'm just saying, if it's going to be really expensive and you don't necessarily have the money to spare, maybe hold back for generation two or three, just to make sure that it's going to stick around. Emmanuel Meberg of four h four Media has an article titled YouTube enhances comment section with AI generated nonsense, and y'all, I just can't. I mean, YouTube's comment section is already a breeding ground for nonsense. Now, don't get me wrong, there are actually some great community members out there in various communities who post positive and supportive and helpful comments. There are others who might be a little more abrasive, but they clearly mean well in their criticism. Then there's the ones who don't mean well in their criticisms, and then the outright jokesters and trolls. The jokesters just want an opportunity to crack a punchline and work on their material, and the trolls just want to upset whomever they can. And then you've got like stalkers who are fostering unhealthy parasocial relationships online. And then you've got bots that are just trying to trick people into going to malicious or shady websites. Do we really need to add more AI to this mix? Who? Apparently, YouTube's answer is yes. Now, in this case, the AI is actually intended to give content creators the ability to interact with, or at least to appear to interact with their communities without as much effort. It's meant to let creators reply to comments faster and easier, But, as my Berg writes, the results aren't always helpful. In fact, in his words, they sometimes can end up being quote misleading, nonsensical, or weirdly intimate end quote. Now, this tool is not fully automated. It's not like it just automatically goes and starts answering every comment left on a creator's channel. Instead, it sort of auto suggests a reply, and if the reply is one that the content creator likes, they can just post it. So that's pretty good, right. It gives the creator the ultimate editorial control to whether you know, they post it or just write their own response. It's kind of like the auto messages that are generated by a lot of different texting or messaging apps these days. I suggest reading My Bird's piece for a full rundown on the topic, as it includes some amusing examples of how the AI suggested replies that maybe just aren't the best fit for the comments that were left behind. Brandon Viiglia Rollo of The Register has a headline that definitely caught my attention this week. The headline is America cops are using AI to draft police reports and the ACLU isn't happy. So police officers cops they have to write up reports detailing their work they have to document everything that they're doing when it relates to their interactions with the public and pursuing suspects and all that stuff. They have to report everything because all of those details matter, particularly once an issue reaches the court system, where prosecutors are reliant upon these reports in order to make their case. Now, once upon a time, many many many years ago, one of my first jobs was to transcribe similar reports. Now I had to take handwritten reports, and then I would have to type those reports up. This was for a security firm. It was not a police station. It was a police force. But several members of the security team were either active cops or former cops and they were moonlighting as security officers. And y'all to say those reports were often incomprehensible is being too generous. Not all police officers are gifted with the ability to write a clear, concise report. Some of those reports they might as well have been gibberished. Now, granted, I was working again for a security firm, not for a police station, so it could have been different because of that. But anyway, I can see why police forces might wish to experiment with a tool that makes writing reports a lot easier to do and easier to understand and reference, you know, easier to follow. Like some of those reports, I would type literally what had been written, but I couldn't tell you what the report was actually saying, because it wasn't written in a way that followed a clear line of thought, at least not from my perspective. But there's an understandable concern that an automated approach to generating reports could result in documentation that's treated as official but as fundamentally incorrect, misleading, or militia, even if it's not intentionally malicious. The technology that viglia Rollo alludes to is called Draft one. It's from a company called Axon. So this technology takes footage captured by body cameras that are warned by police officers, and it then generates reports based off that footage. Cops then have the ability to edit these reports, and so they can go in and correct any mistakes that might be in the generated report. They might elaborate on points that weren't captured by the camera or the AI tool. But the ACLU has pointed out that offloading reports to AI reports that again prosecutors rely upon during criminal trials that's inevitably going to lead to civil rights violations and related issues, and I think that's a pretty safe bet that there will be these negative consequences. I mean, we've already talked multiple times on this show about how certain technologies, such as facial recognition algorithms, frequently have massive blind spots that disproportionately affect already vulnerable populations. So in the case with facial recognition tools, if you're not a white male, the success rate for those tools begins to fall, and you know, depending upon what demographic you fall into, you could end up being the victim of a false positive or a false negative. I mean, it's proven to be an unreliable technology because of the inherent bias that underlies the tech. Not saying that the tech can't get to a point where it could reliably identify people, but as it has been trained and designed, it doesn't for certain populations. And often these are the same populations that are disproportionately criminalized. And to get into that gets into a whole sociology thing that goes so far beyond tech. So we're not going to do that. I'm just saying tools like this can add to those problems. And make them worse. So well, the ACLU is urging that police not use this tool. That in fact, municipalities end up banning the use of AI generated police reports because of the potential harm it can have on innocent citizens or just citizens in general, Like it can violate your rights, and that's something that is not supposed to happen and yet does a lot. So let's not make the problem worse. It's what the ACLU is saying. As viglia Rolo points out, the company behind this I mentioned them once before, Axon already has a pretty rough reputation. So a couple of years ago, Axon proposed the brilliant idea of attaching tasers to remote controlled drones for the purposes of law enforcement. So you would have like taser armed flying drones that some police officer using a remote control could operate and then zap people with. Not very long after the company made that announcement, their entire or nearly their entire ethics board resigned in protest. Like when you've got an ethics board and they're like, oh, for heaven's sake, this is so clearly not ethical, what are we even doing here? And then they just they leave, don't even bother to shut the door on the way out. That is sending a pretty strong message. Now, in that case, Axon did back away from that particular project, so we don't have those taser armed drones flying around, for which I am thankful. I highly recommend the article and the register if you want to learn more about this. Again. That's by Brandon viglia Rolo and the article title is American cops are using AI to draft police reports and the ACLU isn't happy. All right, let's take another quick break. When we come back, I got a couple more news items I want to talk about, and we'll be right back. Okay. Next up, we have a story from Avrum Pilch of Tom's Hardware. Tom's Hardware is a great resource, by the way, I don't know if you've ever used it. I highly recommend it. I mean I used to use Tom's Hardware just to literally get my hands on certain electronic pieces and that kind of stuff. But there's a ton of great articles on there too. Anyway. Pilch's article on Tom's Hardware is titled Microsoft recall screenshots, credit cards and Social Security numbers. Even with the sensitive Information filter enabled, Okay, that's a little hard for me to parse the way I said it. Essentially, what they're talking about here, what Pilch is saying is that Microsoft Recall, which is a feature in certain new Windows eleven laptops, the Copilot plus PCs. Essentially it has some blind spots, some issues that probably need to be a if you don't recall Microsoft recall. I love how I changed my pronunciation, just depending on how I feel anyway. It's a feature that's in recent PCs in which the computer takes screenshots of whatever it is you're doing on the device, and it just keeps a record of these screenshots. Then you can actually search those screenshots to find information. And you might say, well, what good does that do. Well, let's say you are doing something that you very rarely have to do, Like it's a task that you have to do once in a blue moon, so every time you do it, you have to relearn how to do it because you're not doing it every day. Well, this could help you quickly go back and retrace your steps and say, ah, here, that's what I need to do in order to complete this task. I just you know, search my screen shots and I found out what I need to do, and I'm good to go. And Microsoft had introduced this or announced this earlier this year, but that initial announcement did a lot of people to voice concerns about the feature, specifically concerns about security and privacy. People didn't like the idea of their activities on the computer becoming like a record, a searchable record, for lots of reasons. I think you can probably imagine there are a lot of legitimate reasons why you wouldn't want to have like a searchable record of your activities on your computer. For example, let's say that you were researching something like divorce, like maybe you're in an unhappy relationship, you wouldn't necessarily want that to be a searchable record on your computer. Or maybe you're researching something about a health issue and that's not anyone else's business, so you don't want that to be searchable. There are a lot of legitimate and innocent reasons why you wouldn't want to have a full record of your activities just sitting there on your computer. But let's say that you did come around to saying, okay, well this is more helpful than harmful. I definitely want to make sure that and Microsoft assured people that the recall feature exists solely at the device level. In other words, it's not sending information over the cloud to Microsoft or to other partners. It all lives on the machine. So that way, as long as the machine is in your possession, you're good. But that's still kind of a concern because if someone were to get access to your machine, then they would be able to see a full history of your activities that might include stuff that gives them information about logins and all that other kind of information. So then Microsoft said, Okay, we're gonna work on this. They kind of pushed back the debut of recall, and then they incorporated a couple of new features. One is that the screenshots are all encrypted, which means if you don't have administrative access to the computer or whatever, or user access, like you don't have the password to get into someone's machine, you can't do anything with those files unless you first decrypt them. Presumably that would take a very long time to do and wouldn't be worth your effort. But as Pilch notes, sometimes recall will capture sensitive information that it should not capture in a screenshot and will leave it in plain text. Although the screenshot itself is encrypted, if you were to look at the screenshot, you would see the information that shouldn't be protected in clear text. That's a problem. So for example, credit card information. By default, screenshots are not supposed to be taken of that kind of info. And if you're using like a shopping site, Recalls pretty good about not doing that. But Pilch found that if you were using other cases, like let's say you've got a PDF file and you open up the PDF file and you're filling out the fields on this PDF file, they've made it, you know, editable, so you might have a file that has government information on it, like if you were filing for a passport or something. He found that in those cases, Recall would take screenshots and the sensitive information would be clearly viewable in the screenshots, and that's an issue. Again. The screenshot itself is encrypted and it lives just on the device, but still a concern like there's this record there that doesn't necessarily need to be there. Microsoft says that it's continually working on its features, so maybe this will be something that gets patched out later on, but I think it's good to be alert and aware about these sorts of things. So every country in the world has rules around certain bands of radio frequencies and how those bands can be used. So here in the United States, the Federal Communications Commission or FCC oversees this, and recently they opened up a frequency band, the six gigahertz frequency band. In fact that the band itself is like one point two gigaherts wide. But they've opened this up to very low power devices. So this doesn't apply to anyone who perhaps wanted to build a mega transmitter in the six gigahertz band or anything like that. There's still not a lot to do that. However, it does allow for short range wireless devices, so for example, in car entertainment systems or short range health monitoring devices, those kinds of things, Internet of things kind of applications. The data throughput in the six gigahertz range is far greater than what you would get with the technology like Bluetooth. But that just means that the implementation of the technology should guide your choice as to which technology, which wireless technology you incorporate into your invention. So if whatever application you have in mind just requires small amounts of data transfers like it's just little packets of data. Bluetooth would be a great solution for that. It's it does that job great, But if you need something that has a bit more oomph in the data transmission context, well then you would probably want to use this band of frequencies. One other issue with this is that you could run into interfer appearence. That's why the FCC has only allowed for very low power applications using this band because if it's very low power, the range of transmission is not going to be very far, so the chance for interference is lower. If you have higher power outputs, then you're going to have more opportunities for interference, which means more error rates and things of that nature. So if you just restrict how much power the device is able to use, you really sidestep that problem just because they don't transmit far enough for interference to typically be an issue. Okay, our last story before we get to recommended reading is about the game awards that happened this week. Now I'm going to cut right to the chase. The Game of the Year went to Astrobot. I have not played Astrobot, but everything I've heard suggests that it is worthy of the title of Game of the Year, even though I'm a little salty that like a dragon Infinite Wealth didn't make it to the nominee list for a Game of the Year. But then I play maybe three or four games in a twelve month period, so I don't have the experience to make a good call on these kinds of things, Like I am certainly not an expert because I don't play enough. But anyway, the Game Awards are really known for two things, you know, giving out trophies to games and creators and also showing a buttload of trailers for upcoming video game titles. So some of the stuff shown off during the awards included a teaser for a game from Naughty Dog. They make the uncharted games. It's titled Intergalactic the Heretic Project. They showed a trailer for an elden Ring multiplayer spinoff game called night Rain. They showed off a trailer for a new entry in the Venerable Witcher series of games, so this would be the Witcher four. They gave a first look at the upcoming Borderlands four game. They announced a new Turrok game of all things that was a shock and lots more stuff too, So if you are a gamer, and somehow you missed out on all the hype and all the announcements. I recommend you take some time today to watch a truckload of trailers and catch up and get excited for what's coming next year. I'll have to say, like the last couple of years have been pretty darn phenomenal on the video game front. There have been some really incredible titles to come out, and while I've only had a chance to play a few of them, I'm just amazed at the creativity and the innovation that's going on in the video game space, mostly in the independent space, like the TRIPAA titles and stuff. Those are always, you know, impressive and everything. And I'd be lying if I said I wasn't looking forward to Grand Theft Auto six. I am, But honestly, I think some of the most exciting developments in the video game space have been in the independent area. There've been some great games. No independent itself is a broad spectrum. Some independent studios are teeny tiny and consist of maybe one or two people, and some independent studios are actually quite large and have support from much bigger companies somewhere along the line. So you know, that's a huge range in itself. Okay, I do have some recommended reading for y'all, and this stuff is pretty deep and some of it's super heavy, So I didn't tackle it in today's episode because typically the entries here are fairly short, and I feel like these are stories that require a lot more reading and consideration and you can't easily summarize them. So up first is Ian Sample's piece in The Guardian titled unprecedented risk to life on Earth Scientists call for halt on mirror life MicroB research, you know, in case those drones over New Jersey aren't filling you with enough existential dread, but a very important piece just scary. Then there's Dan Gooden's peace in Ours Tetnica titled Russia takes unusual route to hack Starlink connected devices in Ukraine and it details the rather circuitous route that Russia has created in an effort to spy on Ukrainian forces in that war. And finally there's Ashley Bellinger's piece, also in Ours Technica that's titled character dot AI steps up teen safety after bots allegedly caused suicide self harm. So yeah, that last article in particular is very hard to read It does deal with kids and mental health issues and suicide, but I think it's important to stay informed about how interactions with AI can have very real and sometimes extremely tragic consequences in our world, and to learn more about what companies are doing or not doing to address those issues. That's it for this episode. It was a long news episode, but you know, we're wrapping up the year. There's a lot to talk about, and besides which I won't be doing this much longer, so it's good to get it all out now. I hope all of you out there are doing really well. I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.