TechStuffElon Musk has changed Twitter to X, and a lot of people are puzzled and unhappy about it. Plus, the ESRB wants to make sure you're old enough to play that video game. And Apple faces another massive lawsuit due to its app store practices. And more!
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio.
Hey there, and.
Welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for Tuesday, July twenty fifth, twenty twenty three. And let's get this out of the way first. Elon Musk has rushed into changing Twitter into his long talked about it does Everything app called X. Musk actually has a long history with X. He actually also has a lot of x'es. Back in the late nineteen nineties, Musk was part of a group that founded a site called x dot com. It was essentially an online bank. Then they acquired a competing service called Confinity, and primarily they became own as a service that allowed users to do money transfers over the internet. X dot com was purchased by eBay and became PayPal, and Elon Musk was subsequently ousted from PayPal when Peter Thiel led a coup and his group gave Elon Musk the boot. Apparently they found him difficult to work with, but of course by that time he had already received his massive payout of eBay purchasing the company, so he was well on his way from going from being wealthy to obscenely wealthy. The domain X dot com remained at PayPal for more than a decade. However, in twenty seventeen, Musk purchased the rights to the name from PayPal for nostalgic reasons. Meanwhile, over in China, the company ten Cent had in twenty eleven released an app called we Chat. As Stefan would say, this app hasing instant messaging, voice messaging, one to many messaging like Twitter, mobile payments, and other social media functions. Probably the worst Saturday Night Live sketch I've ever done. When Elon Musk started talking about acquiring Twitter, he also said his long term plan was to incorporate Twitter's functionality into an everything app similar to we Chat, but for the rest of the world, and that he was going to call this app X.
Well. This past weekend, Musk.
Started making those changes, So if you visit Twitter dot com, you'll see that there's now an X logo in place of the once familiar bird logo that had been there for ages.
It's gone now.
There's been no shortage of criticisms for this move. A lot of folks question the wisdom of ditching more than a decade of branding and ip. In fact, Twitter and tweeting are common words in the text sphere, and a lot of people are suggesting that it's just a really bad move to just unceremoniously ditch all that the police also thought it was a bad move temporarily, or at least that the physical act of taking the word Twitter down outside the company's HQ was a really bad move because that involved a crane that blocked two lanes of traffic on a busy street, and there was a question about whether or not Elon Musk had bothered to get a permit to do that. Anyway, the crew only managed to remove the twitt from the logo before the delays set in, so the er was still on there. I almost said that the crew managed to remove the twit, but Elon's still at the company, so I guess that's not true. AO, The stompage was just a temporary delay. The police determined that no crime was being committed, and so you know, they didn't actually charge anyone with anything.
Anyway.
Musk says that the twins name once made sense back in the day when you were limited to sending messages of one hundred and forty or fewer characters, but these days you can post a lot more stuff, including long form video. So he argues Twitter as a name doesn't make any sense personally. I disagree. I don't think that the increase in services and capability and functionality has negated the sense of the name. But then again, I also don't have even one billion dollars to my name, so what do I know. Musk also said that tweets should now be called x's, and maybe that'll catch on. There's also the possibility that Musk will just gut this newly renamed service of some of its features as he pushes for X to be the everything app he wants it to be. You know. Rumor has it that he doesn't really like the retweet feature and that that might just be you know, on on borrowed time. Now, there are questions remaining that will he be able to succeed, Will he be able to create an X app that has some but not all, of Twitter's functionality as well as other functions and make it a success, or maybe other services like Threads or blue Sky or Mastodon will take the reins, or maybe people will just come to the conclusion that they are fed up with Twitter style social platforms. I know I'm one of those. I technically have a Thread's account and a blue Sky account and a mastadon account, and I very rarely check them because I just find them exhausting. Now, I did mention masddon just a moment ago, which is a federated approach to social platforms. That means that rather than having a centralized corporate structure where you have a single entity that dictates the rules and policies for the platform, Mastedon consists of multiple in instances called servers, and each server can have its own rules and policies and vibe and culture. So some servers cater more to a specific community than others do, like this community is for queer creators, for example, that might be one masted On server. Not that you know it's exclusively that, but that's who was in mind when they created the server. So this kind of system facilitates communication across servers. So even if you join server A and your friend joins server B, you can still communicate with each other through this system. Discovery is a little trickier if you're on different servers, but still possible. It's just not as intuitive. But Mastodon is in the news for a really grim reason. Some researchers at Stanford discovered that after examining three hundred and twenty five thousand posts, they found one hundred and twelve instances of known child sexual abuse material, also known as seesam c SAM. Their search covered the twenty five most popular servers on Mastodon, and in addition to the messages actually containing known seesam, they found more than a thousand instances of messages pointing to off site seesam you know resources, whether it was a trading site or grooming sites. Terrible awful things, and it points to a really big challenge with the federated approach to these social networks because big centralized companies can have entire departments that are filled with content moderators, or actually, more likely they'll outsource that to a third party company that is employing people in developing countries. We've seen that over and over and how that has affected people who are working in those jobs. The point is they have a lot of people who are working on the problem in these big centralized companies, but in the THETA verse. You're talking about instances that have only a single moderator running them, and chances are being the server's one moderator is not actually that person's real job. They've got another job, and they just do this on the side, like in their spare time, which means that when problems arise, you know, when people are violating terms of service or when they are posting outright illegal content, it takes time for the moderator to be able to address it. And if it's happening a lot and you've only got the one moderator, then those problems really start to pile up. For these federated services to survive, I suspect they're going to have to develop and incorporate a lot more automated tools to supplement the work that's being done by human moderators. Here's a case where you can make a real strong argument for the need for AI. You would need AI powered tools that are very good at identifying instances that have illegal material or CESAM related material on them so that you can respond much more quickly and decisively and have a safe community. Otherwise, these services will not really be able to take the place of these centralized services. That currently dominate the web because they won't be able to scale without encountering massive problems like being saturated with illegal and harmful content. So it is the dark side of the fediverse. Okay, one more story before we go to break, and that is you know, I talked about PayPal a little bit earlier. I mean I was talking about Musk's history with the letter X. Let's talk about the US Federal Reserve because it has a new system being rolled out called fed now. So this service coordinates payment between different financial institutions like banks and credit unions. So at launch, thirty five banks and credit unions are included in this system. But that's just the very beginning of this initiative. The goal is to create a network work that connects more than nine thousand financial institutions together for what purpose well, essentially to make it easy for people, at least people who have a bank account to transfer money to each other, So forget checks or debit cards or even apps like Venmo or PayPal. By the way, PayPal owns Venmo in case you weren't aware, I remember hearing some millennials talk about, you know, dissing PayPal because they want to use Venmo, and I was just like you do know PayPal owns Venmo, You're still using PayPal right or any of those other cash transfer apps. So this would allow you to make direct transfers from one bank account to another, as long as the two banks or community credit unions or whatever it may be are connected within this network, the FED and visions FED now to also allow people to access funds much faster with fewer roadblocks.
So imagine, let's say that.
You run a small business and you invoice another company because they've hired you to do some work and you did the work, so you send them an invoice and they can pay you through FED now. Well, the money can go through much more quickly and then you can access it right away. And obviously that can be really helpful for people who have cash flow issues right where you know, it's not that they don't have money coming to them, it's just it's not in their account right now. This can help cut down on those kinds of situations and streamline those financial transactions. So it could be person to person, it could be company to person or person to company. It's meant to just kind of facilitate all of that and to remove the need for these third party applications. There's still a long way to go to get to that point, obviously. Whether just thirty five initial systems that are in place, that's not enough obviously to really make a huge difference. Also, the participating institutions are not required to fully implement all the services, so some are taking it a little more slowly than others, and they're only allowing certain services to be used within their systems. So fed now has the potential to disrupt stuff like PayPal and Venmo and cash apps and things like that, but it's not going to happen overnight, and for the people who are unbanked or underbanked, this might not prove to be a relevant technology. We still have to find ways to facilitate them being part of these financial transactions because just having a bank account can be a barrier to entry for a lot of people. So it still needs to address that issue too, And I don't know that the system ultimately will. That may not even be in the mission statement at all for fed now, but it is interesting that it could have a massive impact on money transfers using the internet.
Okay, now we're going to take a quick break when we come back.
We've got a lot more news to cover, all right, We're back.
More than one thousand.
App developers in the UK I think around fifteen hundred actually have joined in on a class action lawsuit against Apple. They argue that Apple is using its monopoly as a storefront for iOS apps to charge high fees to developers.
So this is a.
Complaint we have heard numerous times in the past and has been addressed in various court cases around the world. So, as you likely know, Apple collects between fifteen to thirty percent on in app transactions for most types of transactions. There are some that get an exception, but for most Apple gets a fifteen to thirty percent cut. So if you spend a dollar in an app from a really big developer, that developer might only get seventy cents of that dollar and the other thirty cents goes to Apple. And you know, that doesn't sound like that much, But then you start thinking about all the apps and the millions of people, the hundreds of millions of people who are using iOS apps to do these different transactions. It really adds up, and it means Apple breaks in the big bucks through this practice. The app developers argue this is unfair to them because there's nowhere else they can go if they want to get their app in front of iOS users. There's no alternative to the Apple App Store, so there's no competition in the space, and that means Apple holds a monopoly for that market and can dictate terms. The lawsuit is seeking a billion dollars from Apple. Is a billion dollar class action lawsuit. Recently, Apple has made some steps to move away from its kind of iron grip approach that it had been known for for years, and those steps include things like allowing developers to use different financial services to complete transactions instead of Apple's own in house financial system, all the way to potentially opening up so that competing app storefronts can offer apps on iOS devices. One word about the different third party financial services thing, Apple, at least in some markets, was kind of sneaky about this, Like, yes, they allowed it, you could use a different financial services company to complete your transactions, but Apple would put essentially like an Apple tax on top of it, which means you would actually collect even less money per transaction. And obviously a lot of people are challenging that, saying Apple is doing this unfairly that you unwilling to relinquish control. Apple creates disincentives to use any alternatives. So yes, technically there are alternatives, but they are less attractive than Apple's own approach because Apple has artificially made them more expensive. That's been an argument in some regions as well, so we'll have to see how this one plays out. Google recently published its Environmental Impact Report for twenty twenty two, and the company revealed that it is using a truly enormous amount of water every year. Last year, the company used five point six billion gallons of water, most of it potable water, meaning drinkable water, water that's safe to drink. Many of Google's data centers depend upon water cooled systems to keep machines in operation twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. The general expectation is that twenty twenty three is going to see another big jump in water consumption because Google, like a lot of other companies, has pushed forward really hard in the AI space, and AI requires a lot of compute power, so to meet those requirements, it shouldn't be a surprise that Google is going to need to consume more resources in order to keep machines running. Below critical temperatures. According to Google reps, the company is also relying on air cooled systems to help reduce the need for water, particularly in places that are impacted by a water crisis, and Google says it is committed to replenish quote one hundred and twenty percent of the freshwater it consumes end quote by twenty thirty. That's according to Business Insider. However, in that same article, the writer reveals that currently Google replenishes just six percent of the freshwater it consumes, So obviously the company is going to have to make some substantial changes to meet that one hundred and twenty percent goal within seven years. Considering that large parts of the US are either currently in a water crisis or they very well may be in a water crisis within a year or two, this is a real problem that needs a serious solution. Now stop me if you've heard this one. Tech companies see a potentially massive market. There's a tiny catch, however, this market is in a region that's run by an oppressive, authoritarian government, and that government is going to have some tight restrictions on any company that works within that region, up to and including requiring the companies to share data with the government itself. Plus the government has been connected with atrocious acts in the past. Yes, we saw this actually happen in China. And while a lot of tech companies were initially very eager to get across and get access to the enormous population of potential users in China, a lot of those same companies later abandoned China after discovering that sure enough, doing business there came with too many downsides. Well, I guess we can say those companies learned from their mistakes, because they're ready to repeat them almost exactly by the way, I lifted that joke from Peter Cook in a Beyond the Fringe sketch. Anyway, Saudi Arabian officials are courting tech companies to set up operations within Saudi Arabia, partly to create a new technological wonder city that some people are really worried is going to become like the perfect surveillance city to keep track on the movements of everyone who's within it. It's pretty dystopian stuff. So the effort is to make Saudi Arabia a global center for tech as part of a plan called the Vision twenty thirty plan. Companies that have signed on include Google, which signed on last year, and Microsoft, which signed on this year, both of which are now building cloud centers within Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, human rights experts warned that Saudi Arabia has some rather vague but powerful laws regarding national security which give the government really kind of limitless power to make demands of companies that operate within their borders, and that those demands could include telling Google and Microsoft and other tech companies that they have to share information so that the government can do things like track down dissidents. And in Saudi Arabia, a dissident can be someone like a journalist reporting on the dealings of the Saudi Arabian royalty. And as we have seen, the government is not above assassinating people like that. It has happened, It happened not long ago. You speak out against authoritarian power in Saudi Arabia, you face massive consequences. A woman in Saudi Arabia criticized this futuristic technological city on Twitter. She is now serving a thirty year jail sentence for speaking out about it. So there's this huge concern that Google and Microsoft, in an eagerness to tap into the undeniably huge amount of money that's in Saudi Arabia are also turning a blind eye to the consequences of that deal, and that they are becoming accomplices to an authoritarian government that commits terrible acts upon its own people. Company representatives for both Microsoft and Google have essentially said they're committed to protecting human rights, but critics say that doesn't exactly align with them agreeing to do business in a country that has an undeniable history of violating human rights. So yeah, it's it's hard to take these companies at their word when it's undeniable that the government has abused its power multiple times in order to strike down any who would question that government's, you know, authority or its practices. So yeah, pretty ugly stuff. Okay, I've got a couple more stories to talk about before we get to that. Let's take another quick break. So, the Entertainment Software Rating Board or ESRB would very much like to scan your face before you launch into that play session of Doom. So, according to PC Gamer, the ESRB and some partners it's working with are planning to launch a tool that they're calling the Privacy Protective Facial Age Estimation. So the purpose of this would be to determine if the person who's trying to buy a game or to go through an in app purchase or activate some other feature in the game that's meant for adults is actually of age that they're old enough to do that and not be violating some policy somewhere. And the FTC is considering the measure and has opened up the matter to public feedback and will continue to accept public feedback until August two. First, so, if you're in the United States and you have some thoughts about this, you should probably go to the FTC's website and find the page that is actually about this measure and leave your thoughts, whether it's in support or against. I'm not telling you how to feel personally, I'm against it, but you know, I can also see why there is a call for this, because otherwise you're requiring adults to take a very active role in overseeing the types of stuff their children are getting involved in. And while I think that's necessary, I also think it's not always realistic, right, Like, even the most loving parents are going to have issues following through with that because they have their own stuff they got to deal with. I assume I don't have kids, so I don't have this issue. My dog isn't a gamer, so I don't ever have to worry about this anyway.
We have talked a.
Lot in this show about how facial recognition technology in general has some really big problem and it makes me wonder how accurate the system really is? Right can it tell the difference between say, a mature fifteen year old and a young looking eighteen year old, Because the eighteen year old will be old enough to play games that get like a mature rating, the fifteen year old would not be. How is this system going to be able to tell the difference reliably? Like sure, after a certain age it might not have an issue, But for younger players, like people who are of age but they look young, that's going to be an issue. And it gets really invasive, and there's a lot of privacy concerns obviously about this. It's kind of weird. It reminds me a lot of how in Japan there were companies that were making cigarette vending machines and they were incorporating cameras and facial recognition technology to try and prevent kids from being able to buy cigarettes out of these machines. The kids just figured they could hold up the face of an older person, like a picture of a face of an older person, not the actual face that would have been really disturbing, but a picture of a face, and that would be enough to fool the system. Supposedly, this this system they're talking about, would not be fooled by holding up a picture. You would have to actually have a three dimensional face there. But still it seems weird and invasive, And you know, I get that the ESRB is trying to stay ahead of governments from regulating the video game industry. That's the whole purpose of the ESRB in the first place.
If you don't.
Remember, back in the nineteen nineties, the video game industry as a whole formed the Entertainment Software Rating Board as a way to address government concerns that the video game industry was creating games that would, you know, turn children into total monsters because they would play Mortal Kombat and become, I don't know, gremlins or something. So the ESRB existed in order to give rating to these different games. Now it sounds like the ESRB is trying to come up with ways to ensure that the people who are buying games are actually old enough to do it, and maybe that's to head off any potential government regulation that would otherwise enter into the industry, But in my opinion, this particular move is not a good one. Finally, in some NIDOS Science News, researchers at North Carolina State University created a gel like solution that lets them three D print with metal at room temperature. So if you've never used a three D printer, generally speaking, three D printers work in a way where they take some sort of material, like the one that I'm most familiar with is plastic, and you get these filaments made of plastic. It's like a plastic wire almost, and you feed it through the three D printer and it has a chamber that heats up that the plastic melts into like a semi liquid state. Then that ends up going through the three D printer through the print head, which lays down a trail of this semi liquid stuff, which when it cools, it hardens and solidifies, and that's what lets you create three dimensional structures. However, if you're working with materials that have a much higher melting point, it gets really hard to print with them, right, and metals typically have pretty high melting points, not all of them. You know, mercury doesn't, gallium doesn't, but others do, and so they require more specialized equipment. When you're talking about specialized equipment, well then you're talking about stuff getting more expensive, right, because if it has to be built to certain parameters, then it gets to be expensive and you start to lose any advantages you get through being able to three D print right from a financial standpoint anyway, so you might as well not do three D printing and use a more traditional and cheaper approach, even if it's less efficient, because you're not going to spend as much money. While these researchers at North Carolina State University came up with a way to print with copper that doesn't involve heating the copper up to a melting point. Instead, they used copper particles that were in suspension in water, and they added to that suspension some hydrochloric acid, which dropped the pH of the water down to one, and they added particles of utectic gallium indium alloy, and as a kind of binding agent, they also added methyl cellulose and this created that gel like mixture which was liquid enough to go through a three D printer. They could then print what was essentially a two dimensional shape using this mixture, but then by applying heat in specific ways, they could get a predictable reaction from the me It would bend in ways that were predictable, so you would print the shape. You would apply the heat at specific points on this two dimensional shape, and as it would heat up and dry, it would also change shape into whatever it was you wanted to make, and you would get a three dimensional metallic object that's electrically conductive. So really neat, Like you could make components to very specific you know, sizes and measurements using this approach instead of having to make do with, you know, something that's off the shelf, but isn't you know, ideal for whatever use you need. As the object dry is the water and the act evaporate, so you are left behind with just a mix of those two metals plus the methyl cellulose which is kind of binding everything together. So it's really cool technology. I'm not sure when we will see like a lot of practical uses of it, but it is pretty neat. That's it for today's news. I had a couple of other news items, but a lot of them are still developing, so I'm going to wait and maybe cover them on Thursday when there's more to say. And I hope in the meanwhile that you are all well and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
