Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio. And how the tech are Yet, it's time for the tech news for Tuesday, April five, twenty twenty two. Let's get to it now. A lot has happened over the last few days, and some of it was even real. I am, of course referencing the fact that between our last news episode and this one, we had April Fool's Day, a day where in the past we've seen numerous companies release joke news items, fake press releases. Some might go so far as to describe them as lies, and it's hard to argue against that. I think whether or not you think of them as lies really depends heavily on whether or not you thought the joke was funny. Anyway, On top of all that tomfoolery, some important real stuff actually happened. For example, Amazon workers at the JFK eight warehouse on Staten Island, New York, voted to form an employee union. This has been going on for quite some time. The votes are in and they've passed. They needed a simple majority, and that's what they got with two thousand, six hundred fifty four employees voting to form a union and two thousand, one thirty one voting against. So now the employees there can form an independent union and that will get the backing of the National Labor Relations Board here in the US. That union will then have the authority to negotiate collectively for all the employees that the union represents. This is something that Amazon has been fighting against for several years now, and we've heard numerous stories about the company attempting to dissuade employees from organizing. Meanwhile, in Bessemer, Alabama, we're still waiting to find now whether Amazon warehouse workers there have voted to unionize. They actually held the vote and they counted the vote, and the results came in and showed more confirmed votes against unionizing than four But there are also more than four hundred challenged votes in the balance, and that's actually enough to swing the vote in favor of unionizing if enough of them come out as being uh in favor of a union. So that all has to get resolved before we have a firm answer on whether or not a union is forming at that warehouse Uh, the matter is going to have to go to a judiciary authority to determine the outcome, so we'll have to wait a little bit longer to hear back on that. Um. This is a dramatic story that's been playing out for more than a year now, and it's also gonna be interesting to see if the Staten Island vote is going to prompt more employees both of Amazon and of other companies to consider unionizing. If so, we can see some pretty dramatic changes in business in general and the tech industry in particular. UM. And those changes, you know, it's hard to even understand the consequences of them. Uh. It could affect all sorts of things, from the speed of products getting rolled out to the price of them. But importantly, the thing we should keep in mind is the whole purpose of the unions is to guarantee that employees have a fair and uh, you know, equitable treatment from their employer. That's the important thing to remember. The Intercept reports that an Amazon worker chat app that is in development currently contains a list of banned words that includes, you know, stuff you would expect like profanity and slurs. Those are on the no No list and if you were to use this app and try to use those words, your message would presumably be locked. But that list also contains other words like union and ethics and restrooms, which should probably raise some red flags. Now, to clarify things a little bit, the purpose of this particular app, which Amazon officials say it may never be deployed, Like this might be a fuss over something that never actually is used because it is still in development, But the purpose is to let employees give shoutouts to each other. So, in other words, it's all about praising other employees so that they are recognized for their contributions as such, say Amazon reps, the company wants to weed out words and phrases that could potentially be a downer or allow someone to abuse the app, and you know, might prevent someone from saying something like, hey, Bob, you did great work today. Sorry you have to pee in a bottle in order to make quota. Now, as you imagine, acknowledging reality in an Amazon warehouse can really be a drag sometimes and I'm being a bit harsh, but then the whole endeavor seems insincere to me. Then again, the app still is in development. It could change significantly before it's rolled out, and again, it may never be rolled out, so I really shouldn't rush to judge. I think I just do because Amazon has this history of trying to suppress employee organization, and so this news story strikes me as a little insidious. Now, normally I save space stuff for the end of news episodes, and we will have some space stuff at the end of this one. But this particular space story relates to Amazon, so I thought I would round out the trilogy of Amazon news stories. The company has secured eighty three launches over the next five years. These launches relate to the company's Project Kiper, which is similar to space x is starlink product. Amazon plans to launch around three thousand satellites into low Earth orbit, and the satellites will provide Internet access. So customers on Earth will presumably get some sort of like satellite antenna dish kit to set up and that will track satellites as they move overhead and the satellites will provide Internet connectivity to the customers. Satellite provided internet is not a new thing, obviously, but in some regions, like a lot of regions, really satellite service can be your only real Internet solution for you know, a broadband access and they rarely have very many competitors in those spaces. UM and satellite connections do have a couple of downsides, the main one being that due to the distance between your antenna and the satellite and everything else down here on Earth, there can be noticeable latency ak a delay when you want to do stuff. The bandwidth itself can be pretty decent, so once things are initiated, like once you start a download the down it can move pretty quickly, but there's still a lag between when you command something like when you click on a download link and when it actually happens because there's all that distance between the Earth and the satellite. You know, even at the speed of light, it takes a little time for that to go through and it can be long enough for you to notice it. So that's a bit of a downside. It means also that certain things like high end streaming gaming is not really viable on a satellite communication. Still, for some folks in rural and out of the way locations, satellite internet is often the best option for Internet service. UH. There are other issues that this raises, like, just like with starlink UH, the idea of launching thousands of satellites into low Earth orbit concerns scientists on Earth who are worried that they will interfere with astronomical observations and such. But that's where we are now. Over the next five years, Amazon plans on launching the satellites in those three launches, so we'll have to see how that develops. Moving on, Elon Musk, the you know man famous for companies like Tesla and SpaceX, can add yet another title to his business card. He is now a member of Twitter's board of directors. Musk has accumulated nine point to five per cent of Twitter ownership, which makes him the largest shareholder in Twitter. He also posted a poll not too long ago to his followers asking if they thought Twitter rigorously adheres to the ideals of free speech, and a little more than two thirds of the respondents, which numbered more than two million people, said no. This has naturally led some people to worry that Musk might use his position on the board to maybe reverse some decisions regarding blocking certain accounts that were found to be abusive or responsible for spreading misinformation Like there. There's worried that Musk might undermine uh certain moves that Twitter has made in order to fight back against those things. He also pulled his followers asking if they might like an edit button, something that long time Twitter users have wanted for years. Um Musk spent nearly three billion dollars to acquire his stake in Twitter, which seems like a pretty steep price for me to buy an edit button, but there you have it. BuzzFeed News has an interesting article titled TikTok's parent byte Dance, made fake accounts with content scraped from Instagram and Snapchat. Former employees say, uh, that's a lengthy title, and it's a lengthy article, but it's well worth a read. It's also about something that happened around five years ago, so it's not like this is, you know, fresh news, but it's something that we've gotten details about recently. So five years ago is when byte Dance acquired a company called flip a Gram. Flip Agram was a photo and video sharing service, and according to buzzfeeds sources, byte Dance then scraped content off of other services, including Instagram, in order to upload that content to flip Agram, and in the process also created fake accounts that would host that content, so they were taking someone else's videos, creating a fake account on Flipogram, and then putting those videos onto that account. So why did byte Dance do this, Well, one reason might have been to test out what kinds of content would perform best on the platform, sort of like industry research, and byte Dance was primarily interested in targeting American customers, so stealing content from other sources and putting it up on Flipogram was a type of research into the American market. This would inform the company as to what types of content were most likely to draw more people to Flipogram. The company could even inflate the view numbers on such content, giving those account a boost in an effort to attract new users and guide existing once towards the types of content that we're performing best on the platform. So, in other words, you might look at at something and say, oh, this is a thousand likes on it, and it turns out that no, maybe it was only like two hundred likes, and then the company boosted that. Now. Another reason that they were scraping content might have just been to create inventory. Social apps gain value from active users and also their user generated content. So if you have a social app but no one's on it, then it's worthless. Right. The social app is only worth anything if there are people on it and that they're doing stuff there. So the app on its own is just a platform, and empty platforms are not very interesting. This is one of the big reasons why it's hard for new social networking platforms to really make a big impact. The value of Facebook to its user base is typically voiced in a way that's like, that's where everyone I know happens to be. So that's why I'm on Facebook, at least for those of us who are in a certain age range, because it's well documented that younger people are not flocking to Facebook anyway. The practice of scraping is generally looked down upon, and sometimes it's litigated, And in this particular case, I would argue it's even worse because it involves taking content that does not belong to Bite Dance without permission and then falsely posting it elsewhere using a fake profile. So we've seen companies like Meta come down hard on on researchers who are scraping data off public profiles just for the purposes of conducting research. Facebook or Meta has said that's expressly against company policy, and they've shut down researcher profiles for doing that, even if the research itself had real scholastic value to it. You can bet that Meta really doesn't like it when some other corporation is scraping content off of their their services in an effort to build competing products. Anyway, the article is a really good read. It goes into much more detail on the matter and covers other related stuff as well. I recommend you check it out. We've got some more news items to cover, but before we get to that, let's take a quick break. I've talked a lot in recent episodes about how Apple's policy of requiring app developers to use Apple's own payment processing system is landing the company in hot water around the world. You might remember that Dutch authorities have find Apple fifty million euro for that and are considering doing more. Well. We also have to remember that Google has very similar requirements, but until recently, the company wasn't enforcing those requirements with any particular fervor. In other words, for a while, companies can kind of get away with just ignoring that requirement it, but that has changed now. Companies like Amazon and Barnes Noble have found themselves at a point where they either have to accept Google's policy, which is that all digital transactions have to go through Google Plays building system, or they can't offer digital transactions through apps. The policy does not affect stuff like ordering physical goods. So if you know you were using an app in order to order a hard copy of a book from Barnes and Noble, Barnes and Noble could still use its preferred payment processing system for that like that would not be against the rules because you're ordering something physical. It's only if it were a digital copy of the book that you would have to go through Google Plays billing system. So anyway, now you can't use the Barnes and Noble Enook Book Reader to order new e books. It has just become a tablet. It is no longer used to to order and down load digital books to your device. In Amazon's case, we're mostly talking about stuff like Audible content, so audio books and other audio content off of Audible can no longer be purchased unless you're going through Google Play. So you can still buy credits for Audible through the Audible app, but you won't be able to buy titles using a credit or debit card. Directly through the app. Audible memberships will be handled through Google Play billing. And Google has a different arrangement in place for a very small number of companies, notably Spotify as one of those where it's testing a pilot program, but it has not extended that arrangement to companies like Barnes and Noble and Amazon. Now I imagine we'll see some legal challenges to Google's policy similar to what we're seeing with Apple, and that the Spotify arrangement, which is where Google will allow alternate payment systems to be included in apps as long as those apps also include Google Play, like you have to have the official Google building system as an option in there, even in this pilot program. But I imagined that is what we're going to see become the norm overtime. Like it's just I think that's just gonna be the way it has to go. Otherwise, Google is going to be facing some pretty serious antitrust legislation around the world, just as Apple has been. German authorities concluded a month's long investigation into a dark web ring by seizing that rings server infrastructure within Germany. Those servers powered this ring's dark web marketplace, so a black market on the dark web. It appeared to be a market that was Russian and origin because the primary language in the marketplace was Russian and according to the authorities, the market was a popular place to deal in such illegal materials as prohibited drugs, fraudulent documents, and stolen data, among other illegal things. So in addition to shutting down the market, the authorities also sees more than twenty five million dollars worth of cryptocurrency. Million dollars is a lot of money, but it's loose change when you look at how much business passed through the market just back in According to prosecutors, that was that around one point to three billion euros that year. Yauza. Now, typically the shutdown of markets like this one, which the authorities called the Hydra market, that usually ends up just being a bump in the road for illegal activity and black markets in general. It's usually just a matter of time before some other market takes its place. We've seen that in the past with the famous dark web markets like the Silk Road. The United States has formed a new department called the Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy or c d P. According to the US State Department, this organization will quote address the national security challenges, economic opportunities, and implications for US values associated with cyberspace, digital technologies, and digital policy end quote. It will also include three policy units within the bureau. There will be the International Information and Communications Policy, the International Cyberspace Security Unit, and the Digital Freedom Unit. The U. S. Senate will have the responsibility to appoint the head of the bureau, which will be known as an ambassador at large. The State Department has already transferred about sixty employees to the new bureau, and these are employees who are already working in departments relating to international communications and cyber coordination projects. The Department also plans to fill out another thirty or so positions, which will bring up the total staff for this department to nearly one. Honestly, when I first read this news item, my thought, wait, we didn't already have this, am I sure this news item didn't come out like twenty years ago, But yeah, this is a new thing, and I think it's safe to say it's long past do. My hope is that the staff will include experts who can go on to provide useful insight into digital matters, because I'm sure You've all seen examples of politicians who just they're they're in charge of creating legislation that affects the tech sector, but they themselves lack any savvy when it comes to technology. A lot of times we see that kind of legislation not just failed to solve a problem, which frequently is the case, sometimes they create new problems or they'll make an existing problem a worse one. So my hope is, and I realized this is a long shot, but my hope is that this bureau will really help be an asset so that, uh, when, when, when it comes to forming legislation that revolves around the Internet in particular, that we have a more informed approach and one that's more likely to succeed and to achieve the actual goal of the proposed legislation. Uh. That's that's asking a lot, but you know, hope. Springs Eternal CNN Business has an interesting piece about Axie Infinity and a recent hack that has affected that game and the company behind it. The article is titled After a six hundred twenty five million dollar hack, the party must go on And I think I might have to do a full episode on sky Mavis, that's the company that developed the game Axi Infinity, and to cover that not just that company, but other companies like it, because these are businesses that are built on top of the cryptome mining industry, and the value proposition of the company is that by participating in its products, you end up earning cryptocurrency, the idea being that you make money by using the thing. So in the case of Axi Infinity, that's a game in which players collect digital pets essentially called axes. It's in some ways similar to something like Pokemon, and in order to play the game, you first have to either purchase or rent three axis for yourself. The money that you spend in order to enter the game essentially goes into a crypto network called the Ronan network, and playing the game powers the crypto mining efforts, and you earn cryptocurrency through playing. And I really want to look into this further because just from a casual glance, it comes across to me kind of like a pyramid scheme or a an Zi scheme in particular, and that in order for this thing to keep moving ahead, you constantly need a fresh influx of new players to buy into it. Um. But the company, I should stress, has dismissed those criticisms and said, no, it's not a Ponzi scheme. It's not that, and that the aim is to have a self perpetuating system that presumably would not require having new people signing on just to keep it going. Anyway, That's really just part of the story, that little bit, like just the fact that this is a thing that I wasn't really aware of. That was part of the story for me. But the larger part in the article is that the Ronan network was the target of a massive hack and as a result, the hackers were able to steal about twenty million dollars in USDC and around a hundred seventy three thousand ether on the Ethereum blockchain, which is a big old yikes now. The news item also describes that despite activity across the own a network freezing while the company tries to resolve these issues, and we don't know yet if they will be able to recover any of that stolen money. Hopefully they will, but we don't know if that's going to happen or not. Uh. We still see enthusiasts supporting the game and the company, which is really enthusiastic. Now I've got feelings about that, but I haven't played the game. I am also notably not a fan of crypto in general, and I definitely have a bias against this whole sort of thing, and I readily admit that. But I do plan to look into these types of games and companies further to get a better understanding of them, how they work, how secure they are. Uh, and so there will be an episode about these in the future. I will definitely do that. Okay, we've got a few more stories to cover before we get into those. Let's take another quick break. We're back. According to stat Counter, which analyzes stuff like web browser market share, Microsoft's browser Edge managed to edge out Apple's Safari browser to become the second most popular browser on the Internet. But we've got a major caveat to talk about. We're specifically talking about desktop browsers, so we're not including mobile devices at all in this, just browsers that are on desktop and laptop computers. Now in the lead with a bullet is Google's Chrome browser, that maintains around sixty of the market share of all dusktop browsers. Edge is at nine point six five, which puts it slightly ahead of Safari, which is sitting at seven point five seven and again, once you factor in mobile devices, the story changes dramatically. At that point, Chrome's share drops slightly to sixty four point five percent, Edge goes all the way down to four point oh five percent, and so far he jumps up to eight team point eight four percent thanks to all those iPhones out there. Still, I'm sure Microsoft is happy to see the performance climb on desktops, which is nearly where all the focus of Microsoft is like, that's their bread and butter is the desktop world now. Part of the reason for the jump could be because of Windows eleven. The adoption rate of Windows eleven hasn't been spectacular. It has underperformed and also has shown signs of already having plateaued. But those who did purchase new machines with Windows eleven on it found that it became a bit tricky to switch to a different default web browser than Microsoft Edge because Microsoft and made some changes to Windows eleven that appeared to purposefully make such a switch harder to do. Now, Microsoft has since changed those settings, making it much easier to change your default browser if you want to. But it's possible that that was one of the factors that contributed to the numbers. I just don't know for sure, but um, I think Edges a decent browser. I've used it a few times. I have a computer where that is my main browser. Um, and it's fine, it's it's there's nothing wrong with it. I think the the tactics used to kind of give it quote unquote and edge are a little shady. And it's also something that Microsoft has been in trouble for in the past, Like there have been cases where Microsoft was brought into anti competitive lawsuits due to this sort of stuff. But you know, the company did change that, so that's a good thing. And uh yeah, it's not a bad browser, So good on you. Microsoft. The Dolo and Motor Company of Texas, which I should stress is not the same company as the one that originally made the iconic DeLorean d m C twelve sports car, has announced that it will introduce its electric vehicle DeLorean on August twenty two. The company has been teasing this for a while now, and based on the photo that the company has shared of its of its electric vehicle, which only shows a bit of the rear of the car, it's going to look quite a bit different from the classic DeLorean DMC twelve. It is said to feature the beloved and expensive to maintain goal wing doors. Um, and I mean going doors are are one of the things that really set the Delirian apart in my mind. So I am curious about this. I love the look of the old DMC twelve. Uh, it seems like a kind of car we're looking at. It is probably the most satisfying experience you're gonna have with a vehicle. UM. I'm also not sure how much appeal the DeLorean name will have if it doesn't closely resemble the car we all remember from Back to the Future. But if it means that we have another interesting, practical, and you know, hopefully affordable electric vehicle on the market, that's a good thing. I think there needs to be a lot of competition in that space, and competition ultimately benefits the consumer. No word yet on whether or not this electric vehicle will be able to reach eighty eight miles per hour, But then I think most of the old DMC twelve cars wouldn't hit eighty eight miles per hour unless you drove them off a cliff, so that's okay. The state of California has contributed twenty million dollars in grants to a project that will cover eight thousand, five hundred feet of canals in California with solar panels. These are canals that are part of the water management system in the state, and there are a couple of really big goals for the project here. One is to reduce the amount of water lost due to stuff like evaporation. California requires a lot of water. That's the most populated state in the United States, and there are there's a lot of farm land out there too, so the state requires lots and lots of water. So water management in the state has always been a huge issue, and frequently that that issue gets exacerbated by stuff like droughts. Now, the other big goal, obviously is to generate electricity using those solar panels, and this project aims to study the viability of rolling this practice out to the nearly four thousand miles of canals across California. So if it works really well in this kind of test environment, we might see it be adopted more broadly throughout the state and that could end up supplementing California's electricity needs significantly. Producing as much as you know thirteen giga watts of juice as well as save more than sixty billion gallons of water every year. It will take some time to complete this much more modest project. This this sort of experimental project at the University of California has estimated it will be complete as of June tree, so it'll be a while before all of those canals get capped with solar panels. Assuming this project proves to be you know, successful and practical. Axiom Space, the private space company, is set to send an all private astronaut team up to the International Space Station on April eight. This will be the first time that a crew entirely made up of private enterprise astronauts will be sent up to the I s S. I will say that the leader of the mission is a retired NASA astronaut but is now a private astronaut. So Axiom is billing this as being something entirely different from space tourism. Instead, it is quote the beginning of many beginnings for commercializing low Earth orbit end. Quote that's according to Calm Gafarian, a co founder of axiom Com, went on to say, quote we're like in the early days of the Internet, and we haven't even imagined all the possibilities, all the capabilities that we're going to be providing in space. End quote. Now, I don't know about you, but based on how the Internet has kind of shaped out over the last couple of decades, that statement actually fills me with more dread than excitement. But I'll try to be optimistic here. It's very true that we can't even anticipate what sort of things we will learn and benefit from through the commercialization of space. Undoubtedly, even those of us who will never slip the bonds of Earth and fly up into space will still get to see the benefits from those developments as companies conduct interesting R and D in an environment we simply cannot reproduce here on Earth. But I'm still a little bit anxious about it, if I'm honest. Finally, Newsweek reported that a group of scientists have put together a proposed radio message that could be beamed into deep space, and this message would include multiple pathways for some strac terrestrial intelligent beings out there to understand what the contents of that message actually are. Those contents include Earth's location. This is something that physicist Stephen Hawking once said was a supremely bad idea, because any outcome that involves someone actually hearing and understanding the message is more likely to result in negative consequences than positive ones. But let me assuage your fears. The first thing to keep in mind, this message actually has not been sent. It's just been composed, and it might never be sent. But secondly, space is enormous. I mean, Douglas Adams had it right. Space is big, really big, and radio signals travel at the speed of light, which is the fastest stuff in the universe, but it still takes a really long time for light to reach distant locations in space. This is why we describe distances and stuff like light years like it literally takes years for light to travel from certain points to us. If a star is three light years away, that means it takes three hundred years for light to get hear from that star. And we haven't observed any signs of intelligent life outside of our planet. Some days it can be pretty challenging to find signs of intelligent life on our planet. It's it's likely that any intelligent life that is out there, if there is any, is pretty darn far away from us, certainly far enough away where we haven't heard any radio signals from them, which means that you have to, you know, think in terms of how many years have we been listening, uh, and you start to expand beyond that, you assume first, of course, that the alien races are leveraging radio communications in some way. But we haven't heard anything. So that suggests that if there is intelligent life in our galaxy, that it's not very close to us. So it's gonna take a long time for our message to get to some place where someone might be listening. Then it will take them even longer to go from that location to get here, because they will have to travel slower than the speed of light, unless we're talking about beings that are made up of pure energy, in which case we probably wouldn't even recognize them as being alive anyway. So I just think that, you know, worrying about this is is being a little premature. Also, we should keep in mind that again, because space is so big. If you're beaming a message where you're like have a concentrated radio signal and you're sending it out into deep space, if if the intelligent life is off the path of that radio beam, it's not gonna pick up the message anyway, So you'd have to be like incredibly lucky to be targeting the intelligent life in the first place. Otherwise like you could be sending a signal in the wrong direction. Um. Yeah, I just don't think that there's any reason for us to be scared about this. I also don't really think there's any benefit in doing it, um because again, if anything does pick up that message, by the time it gets to our planet, we will have changed so much now it'll be generations and generations after our own that one, we can't assume that that generation wants to make contact with alien life. Two, we don't even really know what will be like at that point um, or even if we'll still be on Earth, maybe we'll have abandoned it for some other place. So the whole practice to me seems impractical. But maybe maybe I'm just being Maybe I'm just being too cynical here. Let me know. Let me know what you think, and if there are any suggestions for topics I should cover on Tech Stuff, let me know that as well. The best way to get in touch with me is to use Twitter. The handle we use for the show is tech Stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Y text Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio. And how the tech are Yet, it's time for the tech news for Tuesday, April five, twenty twenty two. Let's get to it now. A lot has happened over the last few days, and some of it was even real. I am, of course referencing the fact that between our last news episode and this one, we had April Fool's Day, a day where in the past we've seen numerous companies release joke news items, fake press releases. Some might go so far as to describe them as lies, and it's hard to argue against that. I think whether or not you think of them as lies really depends heavily on whether or not you thought the joke was funny. Anyway, On top of all that tomfoolery, some important real stuff actually happened. For example, Amazon workers at the JFK eight warehouse on Staten Island, New York, voted to form an employee union. This has been going on for quite some time. The votes are in and they've passed. They needed a simple majority, and that's what they got with two thousand, six hundred fifty four employees voting to form a union and two thousand, one thirty one voting against. So now the employees there can form an independent union and that will get the backing of the National Labor Relations Board here in the US. That union will then have the authority to negotiate collectively for all the employees that the union represents. This is something that Amazon has been fighting against for several years now, and we've heard numerous stories about the company attempting to dissuade employees from organizing. Meanwhile, in Bessemer, Alabama, we're still waiting to find now whether Amazon warehouse workers there have voted to unionize. They actually held the vote and they counted the vote, and the results came in and showed more confirmed votes against unionizing than four But there are also more than four hundred challenged votes in the balance, and that's actually enough to swing the vote in favor of unionizing if enough of them come out as being uh in favor of a union. So that all has to get resolved before we have a firm answer on whether or not a union is forming at that warehouse Uh, the matter is going to have to go to a judiciary authority to determine the outcome, so we'll have to wait a little bit longer to hear back on that. Um. This is a dramatic story that's been playing out for more than a year now, and it's also gonna be interesting to see if the Staten Island vote is going to prompt more employees both of Amazon and of other companies to consider unionizing. If so, we can see some pretty dramatic changes in business in general and the tech industry in particular. UM. And those changes, you know, it's hard to even understand the consequences of them. Uh. It could affect all sorts of things, from the speed of products getting rolled out to the price of them. But importantly, the thing we should keep in mind is the whole purpose of the unions is to guarantee that employees have a fair and uh, you know, equitable treatment from their employer. That's the important thing to remember. The Intercept reports that an Amazon worker chat app that is in development currently contains a list of banned words that includes, you know, stuff you would expect like profanity and slurs. Those are on the no No list and if you were to use this app and try to use those words, your message would presumably be locked. But that list also contains other words like union and ethics and restrooms, which should probably raise some red flags. Now, to clarify things a little bit, the purpose of this particular app, which Amazon officials say it may never be deployed, Like this might be a fuss over something that never actually is used because it is still in development, But the purpose is to let employees give shoutouts to each other. So, in other words, it's all about praising other employees so that they are recognized for their contributions as such, say Amazon reps, the company wants to weed out words and phrases that could potentially be a downer or allow someone to abuse the app, and you know, might prevent someone from saying something like, hey, Bob, you did great work today. Sorry you have to pee in a bottle in order to make quota. Now, as you imagine, acknowledging reality in an Amazon warehouse can really be a drag sometimes and I'm being a bit harsh, but then the whole endeavor seems insincere to me. Then again, the app still is in development. It could change significantly before it's rolled out, and again, it may never be rolled out, so I really shouldn't rush to judge. I think I just do because Amazon has this history of trying to suppress employee organization, and so this news story strikes me as a little insidious. Now, normally I save space stuff for the end of news episodes, and we will have some space stuff at the end of this one. But this particular space story relates to Amazon, so I thought I would round out the trilogy of Amazon news stories. The company has secured eighty three launches over the next five years. These launches relate to the company's Project Kiper, which is similar to space x is starlink product. Amazon plans to launch around three thousand satellites into low Earth orbit, and the satellites will provide Internet access. So customers on Earth will presumably get some sort of like satellite antenna dish kit to set up and that will track satellites as they move overhead and the satellites will provide Internet connectivity to the customers. Satellite provided internet is not a new thing, obviously, but in some regions, like a lot of regions, really satellite service can be your only real Internet solution for you know, a broadband access and they rarely have very many competitors in those spaces. UM and satellite connections do have a couple of downsides, the main one being that due to the distance between your antenna and the satellite and everything else down here on Earth, there can be noticeable latency ak a delay when you want to do stuff. The bandwidth itself can be pretty decent, so once things are initiated, like once you start a download the down it can move pretty quickly, but there's still a lag between when you command something like when you click on a download link and when it actually happens because there's all that distance between the Earth and the satellite. You know, even at the speed of light, it takes a little time for that to go through and it can be long enough for you to notice it. So that's a bit of a downside. It means also that certain things like high end streaming gaming is not really viable on a satellite communication. Still, for some folks in rural and out of the way locations, satellite internet is often the best option for Internet service. UH. There are other issues that this raises, like, just like with starlink UH, the idea of launching thousands of satellites into low Earth orbit concerns scientists on Earth who are worried that they will interfere with astronomical observations and such. But that's where we are now. Over the next five years, Amazon plans on launching the satellites in those three launches, so we'll have to see how that develops. Moving on, Elon Musk, the you know man famous for companies like Tesla and SpaceX, can add yet another title to his business card. He is now a member of Twitter's board of directors. Musk has accumulated nine point to five per cent of Twitter ownership, which makes him the largest shareholder in Twitter. He also posted a poll not too long ago to his followers asking if they thought Twitter rigorously adheres to the ideals of free speech, and a little more than two thirds of the respondents, which numbered more than two million people, said no. This has naturally led some people to worry that Musk might use his position on the board to maybe reverse some decisions regarding blocking certain accounts that were found to be abusive or responsible for spreading misinformation Like there. There's worried that Musk might undermine uh certain moves that Twitter has made in order to fight back against those things. He also pulled his followers asking if they might like an edit button, something that long time Twitter users have wanted for years. Um Musk spent nearly three billion dollars to acquire his stake in Twitter, which seems like a pretty steep price for me to buy an edit button, but there you have it. BuzzFeed News has an interesting article titled TikTok's parent byte Dance, made fake accounts with content scraped from Instagram and Snapchat. Former employees say, uh, that's a lengthy title, and it's a lengthy article, but it's well worth a read. It's also about something that happened around five years ago, so it's not like this is, you know, fresh news, but it's something that we've gotten details about recently. So five years ago is when byte Dance acquired a company called flip a Gram. Flip Agram was a photo and video sharing service, and according to buzzfeeds sources, byte Dance then scraped content off of other services, including Instagram, in order to upload that content to flip Agram, and in the process also created fake accounts that would host that content, so they were taking someone else's videos, creating a fake account on Flipogram, and then putting those videos onto that account. So why did byte Dance do this, Well, one reason might have been to test out what kinds of content would perform best on the platform, sort of like industry research, and byte Dance was primarily interested in targeting American customers, so stealing content from other sources and putting it up on Flipogram was a type of research into the American market. This would inform the company as to what types of content were most likely to draw more people to Flipogram. The company could even inflate the view numbers on such content, giving those account a boost in an effort to attract new users and guide existing once towards the types of content that we're performing best on the platform. So, in other words, you might look at at something and say, oh, this is a thousand likes on it, and it turns out that no, maybe it was only like two hundred likes, and then the company boosted that. Now. Another reason that they were scraping content might have just been to create inventory. Social apps gain value from active users and also their user generated content. So if you have a social app but no one's on it, then it's worthless. Right. The social app is only worth anything if there are people on it and that they're doing stuff there. So the app on its own is just a platform, and empty platforms are not very interesting. This is one of the big reasons why it's hard for new social networking platforms to really make a big impact. The value of Facebook to its user base is typically voiced in a way that's like, that's where everyone I know happens to be. So that's why I'm on Facebook, at least for those of us who are in a certain age range, because it's well documented that younger people are not flocking to Facebook anyway. The practice of scraping is generally looked down upon, and sometimes it's litigated, And in this particular case, I would argue it's even worse because it involves taking content that does not belong to Bite Dance without permission and then falsely posting it elsewhere using a fake profile. So we've seen companies like Meta come down hard on on researchers who are scraping data off public profiles just for the purposes of conducting research. Facebook or Meta has said that's expressly against company policy, and they've shut down researcher profiles for doing that, even if the research itself had real scholastic value to it. You can bet that Meta really doesn't like it when some other corporation is scraping content off of their their services in an effort to build competing products. Anyway, the article is a really good read. It goes into much more detail on the matter and covers other related stuff as well. I recommend you check it out. We've got some more news items to cover, but before we get to that, let's take a quick break. I've talked a lot in recent episodes about how Apple's policy of requiring app developers to use Apple's own payment processing system is landing the company in hot water around the world. You might remember that Dutch authorities have find Apple fifty million euro for that and are considering doing more. Well. We also have to remember that Google has very similar requirements, but until recently, the company wasn't enforcing those requirements with any particular fervor. In other words, for a while, companies can kind of get away with just ignoring that requirement it, but that has changed now. Companies like Amazon and Barnes Noble have found themselves at a point where they either have to accept Google's policy, which is that all digital transactions have to go through Google Plays building system, or they can't offer digital transactions through apps. The policy does not affect stuff like ordering physical goods. So if you know you were using an app in order to order a hard copy of a book from Barnes and Noble, Barnes and Noble could still use its preferred payment processing system for that like that would not be against the rules because you're ordering something physical. It's only if it were a digital copy of the book that you would have to go through Google Plays billing system. So anyway, now you can't use the Barnes and Noble Enook Book Reader to order new e books. It has just become a tablet. It is no longer used to to order and down load digital books to your device. In Amazon's case, we're mostly talking about stuff like Audible content, so audio books and other audio content off of Audible can no longer be purchased unless you're going through Google Play. So you can still buy credits for Audible through the Audible app, but you won't be able to buy titles using a credit or debit card. Directly through the app. Audible memberships will be handled through Google Play billing. And Google has a different arrangement in place for a very small number of companies, notably Spotify as one of those where it's testing a pilot program, but it has not extended that arrangement to companies like Barnes and Noble and Amazon. Now I imagine we'll see some legal challenges to Google's policy similar to what we're seeing with Apple, and that the Spotify arrangement, which is where Google will allow alternate payment systems to be included in apps as long as those apps also include Google Play, like you have to have the official Google building system as an option in there, even in this pilot program. But I imagined that is what we're going to see become the norm overtime. Like it's just I think that's just gonna be the way it has to go. Otherwise, Google is going to be facing some pretty serious antitrust legislation around the world, just as Apple has been. German authorities concluded a month's long investigation into a dark web ring by seizing that rings server infrastructure within Germany. Those servers powered this ring's dark web marketplace, so a black market on the dark web. It appeared to be a market that was Russian and origin because the primary language in the marketplace was Russian and according to the authorities, the market was a popular place to deal in such illegal materials as prohibited drugs, fraudulent documents, and stolen data, among other illegal things. So in addition to shutting down the market, the authorities also sees more than twenty five million dollars worth of cryptocurrency. Million dollars is a lot of money, but it's loose change when you look at how much business passed through the market just back in According to prosecutors, that was that around one point to three billion euros that year. Yauza. Now, typically the shutdown of markets like this one, which the authorities called the Hydra market, that usually ends up just being a bump in the road for illegal activity and black markets in general. It's usually just a matter of time before some other market takes its place. We've seen that in the past with the famous dark web markets like the Silk Road. The United States has formed a new department called the Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy or c d P. According to the US State Department, this organization will quote address the national security challenges, economic opportunities, and implications for US values associated with cyberspace, digital technologies, and digital policy end quote. It will also include three policy units within the bureau. There will be the International Information and Communications Policy, the International Cyberspace Security Unit, and the Digital Freedom Unit. The U. S. Senate will have the responsibility to appoint the head of the bureau, which will be known as an ambassador at large. The State Department has already transferred about sixty employees to the new bureau, and these are employees who are already working in departments relating to international communications and cyber coordination projects. The Department also plans to fill out another thirty or so positions, which will bring up the total staff for this department to nearly one. Honestly, when I first read this news item, my thought, wait, we didn't already have this, am I sure this news item didn't come out like twenty years ago, But yeah, this is a new thing, and I think it's safe to say it's long past do. My hope is that the staff will include experts who can go on to provide useful insight into digital matters, because I'm sure You've all seen examples of politicians who just they're they're in charge of creating legislation that affects the tech sector, but they themselves lack any savvy when it comes to technology. A lot of times we see that kind of legislation not just failed to solve a problem, which frequently is the case, sometimes they create new problems or they'll make an existing problem a worse one. So my hope is, and I realized this is a long shot, but my hope is that this bureau will really help be an asset so that, uh, when, when, when it comes to forming legislation that revolves around the Internet in particular, that we have a more informed approach and one that's more likely to succeed and to achieve the actual goal of the proposed legislation. Uh. That's that's asking a lot, but you know, hope. Springs Eternal CNN Business has an interesting piece about Axie Infinity and a recent hack that has affected that game and the company behind it. The article is titled After a six hundred twenty five million dollar hack, the party must go on And I think I might have to do a full episode on sky Mavis, that's the company that developed the game Axi Infinity, and to cover that not just that company, but other companies like it, because these are businesses that are built on top of the cryptome mining industry, and the value proposition of the company is that by participating in its products, you end up earning cryptocurrency, the idea being that you make money by using the thing. So in the case of Axi Infinity, that's a game in which players collect digital pets essentially called axes. It's in some ways similar to something like Pokemon, and in order to play the game, you first have to either purchase or rent three axis for yourself. The money that you spend in order to enter the game essentially goes into a crypto network called the Ronan network, and playing the game powers the crypto mining efforts, and you earn cryptocurrency through playing. And I really want to look into this further because just from a casual glance, it comes across to me kind of like a pyramid scheme or a an Zi scheme in particular, and that in order for this thing to keep moving ahead, you constantly need a fresh influx of new players to buy into it. Um. But the company, I should stress, has dismissed those criticisms and said, no, it's not a Ponzi scheme. It's not that, and that the aim is to have a self perpetuating system that presumably would not require having new people signing on just to keep it going. Anyway, That's really just part of the story, that little bit, like just the fact that this is a thing that I wasn't really aware of. That was part of the story for me. But the larger part in the article is that the Ronan network was the target of a massive hack and as a result, the hackers were able to steal about twenty million dollars in USDC and around a hundred seventy three thousand ether on the Ethereum blockchain, which is a big old yikes now. The news item also describes that despite activity across the own a network freezing while the company tries to resolve these issues, and we don't know yet if they will be able to recover any of that stolen money. Hopefully they will, but we don't know if that's going to happen or not. Uh. We still see enthusiasts supporting the game and the company, which is really enthusiastic. Now I've got feelings about that, but I haven't played the game. I am also notably not a fan of crypto in general, and I definitely have a bias against this whole sort of thing, and I readily admit that. But I do plan to look into these types of games and companies further to get a better understanding of them, how they work, how secure they are. Uh, and so there will be an episode about these in the future. I will definitely do that. Okay, we've got a few more stories to cover before we get into those. Let's take another quick break. We're back. According to stat Counter, which analyzes stuff like web browser market share, Microsoft's browser Edge managed to edge out Apple's Safari browser to become the second most popular browser on the Internet. But we've got a major caveat to talk about. We're specifically talking about desktop browsers, so we're not including mobile devices at all in this, just browsers that are on desktop and laptop computers. Now in the lead with a bullet is Google's Chrome browser, that maintains around sixty of the market share of all dusktop browsers. Edge is at nine point six five, which puts it slightly ahead of Safari, which is sitting at seven point five seven and again, once you factor in mobile devices, the story changes dramatically. At that point, Chrome's share drops slightly to sixty four point five percent, Edge goes all the way down to four point oh five percent, and so far he jumps up to eight team point eight four percent thanks to all those iPhones out there. Still, I'm sure Microsoft is happy to see the performance climb on desktops, which is nearly where all the focus of Microsoft is like, that's their bread and butter is the desktop world now. Part of the reason for the jump could be because of Windows eleven. The adoption rate of Windows eleven hasn't been spectacular. It has underperformed and also has shown signs of already having plateaued. But those who did purchase new machines with Windows eleven on it found that it became a bit tricky to switch to a different default web browser than Microsoft Edge because Microsoft and made some changes to Windows eleven that appeared to purposefully make such a switch harder to do. Now, Microsoft has since changed those settings, making it much easier to change your default browser if you want to. But it's possible that that was one of the factors that contributed to the numbers. I just don't know for sure, but um, I think Edges a decent browser. I've used it a few times. I have a computer where that is my main browser. Um, and it's fine, it's it's there's nothing wrong with it. I think the the tactics used to kind of give it quote unquote and edge are a little shady. And it's also something that Microsoft has been in trouble for in the past, Like there have been cases where Microsoft was brought into anti competitive lawsuits due to this sort of stuff. But you know, the company did change that, so that's a good thing. And uh yeah, it's not a bad browser, So good on you. Microsoft. The Dolo and Motor Company of Texas, which I should stress is not the same company as the one that originally made the iconic DeLorean d m C twelve sports car, has announced that it will introduce its electric vehicle DeLorean on August twenty two. The company has been teasing this for a while now, and based on the photo that the company has shared of its of its electric vehicle, which only shows a bit of the rear of the car, it's going to look quite a bit different from the classic DeLorean DMC twelve. It is said to feature the beloved and expensive to maintain goal wing doors. Um, and I mean going doors are are one of the things that really set the Delirian apart in my mind. So I am curious about this. I love the look of the old DMC twelve. Uh, it seems like a kind of car we're looking at. It is probably the most satisfying experience you're gonna have with a vehicle. UM. I'm also not sure how much appeal the DeLorean name will have if it doesn't closely resemble the car we all remember from Back to the Future. But if it means that we have another interesting, practical, and you know, hopefully affordable electric vehicle on the market, that's a good thing. I think there needs to be a lot of competition in that space, and competition ultimately benefits the consumer. No word yet on whether or not this electric vehicle will be able to reach eighty eight miles per hour, But then I think most of the old DMC twelve cars wouldn't hit eighty eight miles per hour unless you drove them off a cliff, so that's okay. The state of California has contributed twenty million dollars in grants to a project that will cover eight thousand, five hundred feet of canals in California with solar panels. These are canals that are part of the water management system in the state, and there are a couple of really big goals for the project here. One is to reduce the amount of water lost due to stuff like evaporation. California requires a lot of water. That's the most populated state in the United States, and there are there's a lot of farm land out there too, so the state requires lots and lots of water. So water management in the state has always been a huge issue, and frequently that that issue gets exacerbated by stuff like droughts. Now, the other big goal, obviously is to generate electricity using those solar panels, and this project aims to study the viability of rolling this practice out to the nearly four thousand miles of canals across California. So if it works really well in this kind of test environment, we might see it be adopted more broadly throughout the state and that could end up supplementing California's electricity needs significantly. Producing as much as you know thirteen giga watts of juice as well as save more than sixty billion gallons of water every year. It will take some time to complete this much more modest project. This this sort of experimental project at the University of California has estimated it will be complete as of June tree, so it'll be a while before all of those canals get capped with solar panels. Assuming this project proves to be you know, successful and practical. Axiom Space, the private space company, is set to send an all private astronaut team up to the International Space Station on April eight. This will be the first time that a crew entirely made up of private enterprise astronauts will be sent up to the I s S. I will say that the leader of the mission is a retired NASA astronaut but is now a private astronaut. So Axiom is billing this as being something entirely different from space tourism. Instead, it is quote the beginning of many beginnings for commercializing low Earth orbit end. Quote that's according to Calm Gafarian, a co founder of axiom Com, went on to say, quote we're like in the early days of the Internet, and we haven't even imagined all the possibilities, all the capabilities that we're going to be providing in space. End quote. Now, I don't know about you, but based on how the Internet has kind of shaped out over the last couple of decades, that statement actually fills me with more dread than excitement. But I'll try to be optimistic here. It's very true that we can't even anticipate what sort of things we will learn and benefit from through the commercialization of space. Undoubtedly, even those of us who will never slip the bonds of Earth and fly up into space will still get to see the benefits from those developments as companies conduct interesting R and D in an environment we simply cannot reproduce here on Earth. But I'm still a little bit anxious about it, if I'm honest. Finally, Newsweek reported that a group of scientists have put together a proposed radio message that could be beamed into deep space, and this message would include multiple pathways for some strac terrestrial intelligent beings out there to understand what the contents of that message actually are. Those contents include Earth's location. This is something that physicist Stephen Hawking once said was a supremely bad idea, because any outcome that involves someone actually hearing and understanding the message is more likely to result in negative consequences than positive ones. But let me assuage your fears. The first thing to keep in mind, this message actually has not been sent. It's just been composed, and it might never be sent. But secondly, space is enormous. I mean, Douglas Adams had it right. Space is big, really big, and radio signals travel at the speed of light, which is the fastest stuff in the universe, but it still takes a really long time for light to reach distant locations in space. This is why we describe distances and stuff like light years like it literally takes years for light to travel from certain points to us. If a star is three light years away, that means it takes three hundred years for light to get hear from that star. And we haven't observed any signs of intelligent life outside of our planet. Some days it can be pretty challenging to find signs of intelligent life on our planet. It's it's likely that any intelligent life that is out there, if there is any, is pretty darn far away from us, certainly far enough away where we haven't heard any radio signals from them, which means that you have to, you know, think in terms of how many years have we been listening, uh, and you start to expand beyond that, you assume first, of course, that the alien races are leveraging radio communications in some way. But we haven't heard anything. So that suggests that if there is intelligent life in our galaxy, that it's not very close to us. So it's gonna take a long time for our message to get to some place where someone might be listening. Then it will take them even longer to go from that location to get here, because they will have to travel slower than the speed of light, unless we're talking about beings that are made up of pure energy, in which case we probably wouldn't even recognize them as being alive anyway. So I just think that, you know, worrying about this is is being a little premature. Also, we should keep in mind that again, because space is so big. If you're beaming a message where you're like have a concentrated radio signal and you're sending it out into deep space, if if the intelligent life is off the path of that radio beam, it's not gonna pick up the message anyway, So you'd have to be like incredibly lucky to be targeting the intelligent life in the first place. Otherwise like you could be sending a signal in the wrong direction. Um. Yeah, I just don't think that there's any reason for us to be scared about this. I also don't really think there's any benefit in doing it, um because again, if anything does pick up that message, by the time it gets to our planet, we will have changed so much now it'll be generations and generations after our own that one, we can't assume that that generation wants to make contact with alien life. Two, we don't even really know what will be like at that point um, or even if we'll still be on Earth, maybe we'll have abandoned it for some other place. So the whole practice to me seems impractical. But maybe maybe I'm just being Maybe I'm just being too cynical here. Let me know. Let me know what you think, and if there are any suggestions for topics I should cover on Tech Stuff, let me know that as well. The best way to get in touch with me is to use Twitter. The handle we use for the show is tech Stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Y text Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.