Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, joth In Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and I love all things tech. It is time for the tech news for Tuesday, November two, twenty one, and we're gonna start off with some old news because didn't do a news episode last Thursday. And as predicted Facebook, the company has changed its name to Meta, which is pretty much in line with what The Verge predicted a couple of weeks ago. Meta in this case is a reference to the concept of a metaverse, which in turn we typically envision as being an implementation of such things as virtual reality and augmented reality, and a persistent online virtual world where you can behave as if it were the real world. You can, you know, do things like shopping, you can have entertainment. Essentially, you have this online, persistent world that in some ways mirrors the real one, except of course you're not burdened by reality. Right, So in the metaverse, you might have an entire social structure that exists inside this virtual world, and you might have some elements of that environment spill out into the real world through stuff like augmented reality technology. So in a way, it's an extension of the concept of social networks, only they become even more immersive. Anyway, I'm sure you're all aware of the name change by now. There's very little chance that I'm telling you this for the first time. Of course, Meta is still going to face a lot of questions from political leaders around the world. A name change is not magically going to make all the critics who want to split the company up say, oh, well, Facebook's gone now. I mean, Facebook the platform is still there, but Facebook the company's gone. We're not, and I don't think that's going to happen. And I suspect as leaders get their heads wrapped around what a metaverse actually is and how it would enable a company like you know, former Facebook now Meta to track even more information about people. There's going to be more questions, or at least I hope there will be. NBC News reports that an internal blog post at what was then Facebook and now as Meta. This is just going to be tiresome anyway, It revealed that the company was actively pursuing opportunities to market to kids, kids as young as six years old. In fact, the blog post identified five different age groups that the company was you know, kind of delineating as targets. They had the six to nine age group, ten to twelve, thirteen to fifteen, sixteen to seventeen, and then everybody else. And I should add that this blog post specifically mentioned stuff like making sure the company protected the security and privacy of users, So at least there's that like this was an internal blog post, it wasn't outward facing. The fact that they even mentioned that we need to do this in a responsible way is at least somewhat comforting, I guess, But I would say this is more grist for the mill when it comes to scrutinizing this enormous company and it's various strategies involving user experiences and more importantly, how the company generates revenue based on user behaviors and how much data they are collecting from users. Now, as I mentioned last week, the Facebook platform itself has seen a decline in use among younger folks, and so this is likely part of the company's overall strategy to find ways to attract new users, not necessarily to the Facebook platform, although I'm sure that's part of it. But you know to the company's services. Overall, Facebook reps defended the blog post. They argued that really, any business that interfaces with the public is always trying to attract new and younger people all the time. Like, if you get people, you know, to connect with your product at a young age, you might have a customer for life. So in that sense, yeah, that that really does make sense. And in fact, Facebook said the only thing that would be newsworthy is if the company wasn't doing this. However, I would add it is a little creepy when you think that as a kind of preventive measure, Facebook said, an age limit on who could have a Facebook or an Instagram profile, you know, you have to be thirteen or older. And that seems like it's a tacit acknowledgement that the services the company provides might not be a good fit for younger users. And when you take the blog post in concert with the thousands of other documents that have emerged thanks to whistleblower Francis Hogan, it all starts to look a little sinister. So yeah, I guess companies that are you know, in the business of dealing with you know, the average consumer are always looking to find a way of tapping into that at a young or age. But um, that doesn't mean it's always good. I mean I could easily point to the case of say, cigarette companies using cartoonish mascots to market their cigarettes and how that is not really a good thing. But we'll leave it for here. Now let's talk about data tracking for a second. So Apple introduced the App Tracking Transparency Policy last year, and this policy sets firm rules that iOS apps must follow. That is, apps that appear on Apple's app stores have to follow these rules or else Apple won't carry them. So, if the app is tracking data in any way, it first has to request user permission to do so and to talk about which types of of data it intends to track. So if a user says no thanks, then the app is not allowed to track that data. To say that some companies were upset about this would be underplaying it. I mean. Facebook went so far as to take out a full page newspaper ad arguing against the policy, saying that you know it would interfere with the Facebook apps performance and give users the mistaken impression that you know, Facebook is collecting loads of private information or to monetize the info which was actually the correct implication because that is what the company does well. Now. The Financial Times reports that companies like you know, Meta Slash, Facebook and Snap and Twitter and YouTube lost nearly ten billion dollars last year due to this policy, and by lost, I mean they weren't able to capitalize on user data for those users who opted out of the data tracking. Snap was hit particularly hard, which is not a big surprise because Snap does not exist outside of the mobile experience. Right There's no desktop version for Snapchat, so that would explain how that company was hit particularly hard because there no other platform for it to depend upon. Uh. Interestingly, Apple itself has been found to engage in practices that break its own rules, so you know, I'm not giving Apple a full pass on this one. I think that the policy is a good one, but only if everybody be behaves and everyone follows it, you know, Apple included. But it does also show a couple of things. And one, it shows that your data is valuable, so you should think about treating it as such, that it has value, and so think about that, you know, take value in it. There are people who have proposed systems that would require companies to pay folks directly in order to be able to use their data. That's how valuable. It is. Not that those policies have actually, you know, seen any real traction, because companies obviously have a strong incentive to resist that, but it shows how how valuable the data is too. This shows these apps are tracking you in tons of different ways, and those ways might relate back to the way the app functions, So there could be some legit arguments that the data tracking is necessary in order for you to have full functionality of the app. But this also reminds us that our phones are constantly data gathering machines. Sin since we pretty much take them everywhere we go, it means we're always being tracked, and the stuff we do is being tracked. The stuff we look up on our phones is being tracked. Just good to remember, you know. Fun times Up in Oregon, in the Pacific Northwest in the United States, there's a bit of a brew haha going on regarding Google and its use of water near the city of the Dowells. That's two words, It's the and dows d A L L. E. S. Actually had to look up how to say that so I wouldn't get the pronunciation wrong. Google has data centers in the Dowells on a site of an old aluminum smelting facility that closed down years ago, like in the eighties, uh, and they built data centers there, and the company plans to build a couple more of those massive data centers. Well, you know, buildings that are filled with computers that are running all the time get pretty hot and you have to keep computers from overheating or else stuff breaks down. So as part of this plan, Google negotiated with the city council of the Dolls and they got a new deal when it comes to water rights. You know, Google uses water to pull heat away from these computers and then through a heat exchanger, cools the heated water back down and can recirculate it through the system in order to keep things at a good operating temperature. Although it does mean that they have to occasionally bring in more water, so it's like a water cooled BC, only on an epic scale. Anyway, this would mean Google would have to collect more water from the area, and it's an area that's also been hit with droughts in the recent past, so this has led some residents to become a bit concerned over the matter, and making it worse is that the amount of water that Google wants is a secret. According to the City of the Dolls, Google's request constitutes a trade secret, and so the city is not allowed to share the information with residents. So the city council knows, but they can't tell. According to other entities in Oregon, the use of water is a matter of public interest and that supersedes any trade secret. Moreover, those people who are concerned have pointed out that Google doesn't provide information about how much water it needs because the city has an information. They know how much water Google needs, and that means that the city is refusing to share information with the citizens of the city. The newspaper the Oregonians sued to get access to that information, and a judge sided with the newspaper, But now the city has countersued the newspaper in order to keep the information secret. Meanwhile, there's a vote coming up on the matter, and a vote that's really only open to the city council members, not the public, and there's no chance that this particular legal matter will be resolved before the vote happens. So things, as you might imagine, are a little bit tense up in the dolls. The city council says that Google's plan will actually mean the more water will be provided to the city, because Google will be contributing nearly thirty million dollars to expand water services for the area. But the secrecy around how much water the company needs seems to be feeding into a general distrust of Google and the city council, at least according to a piece I read on Oregon Live dot com. We've got some more stories to cover, but before we get to that, let's take a quick break. Before the break, I was talking about Google and Oregon. I've got another Google story here, which involves a worker petition that's aimed at convincing both Google and Amazon to back out of a deal that the companies have made with is Real. The deal is called Project Nimbus, and as you might suspect with that name, it involves cloud computing centers. The workers who are leading the petition are two Jewish Google employees, and they're worried that the cloud computing tech quote allows for further surveillance of an unlawful data collection on Palestinians and facilitates expansion of Israel's illegal settlements on the Palestinian land end quote, and the two say that more than one thousand employees have signed a petition, though the petition itself allows employees to remain anonymous, and all but three have done so, so it's obviously hard to verify. According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the cloud computing contract has clauses in it that are meant to prevent Amazon and Google from pulling out of the deal, even if they're under the threat of boycott, so it's questionable whether the petition will make any headway, though it does bring more attention to the project. Last week, I talked about how Hurts, the rental car company, had signed a deal with Tesla to buy one hundred thousand Tesla vehicles by the end of next year. Well Elon Musk then went out and tweeted that the ink has not even been put to paper yet, that no contract has been signed, which, hey, you know, woopsie, because you know, the initial news about that deal pushed Tesla stock value up more than ten percent, like around twelve percent actually, so that means if you had Tesla stock, you potentially could have seen your wealth increase pretty dramatically before Musk revealed that the deal hadn't actually been done yet, which you know, elon Musk and the stock market, there are all these stories that don't paint Musk in a very good light in the way he communicates things. Um. But then, to be fair, if the contract wasn't signed and someone claimed that it was, it's not really on Musk's shoulders this time. But yeah, stock markets are fun, and by fun I mean we all play pretend and hoping you make money. A Hurts, by the way, is still communicating as though this has been a done deal for some time. In fact, the company had told the BBC that Hurts is already receiving deliveries of Tesla vehicles, so that's kind of weird, right. Hurts was directly asked by the BBC if the contract was in fact signed, and a rep said, oh, we don't comment on business dealings to the press. Yeah, okay. Tesla is also opening up a program in the Netherlands that will help people with e vs UH for the first time evs, by the way, electric vehicles for the first time. Tesla is opening up ten supercharger locations in the Netherlands to people who are driving any type of electric vehicle not just Tesla vehicles. Previously, you needed to be driving a Tesla in order to make use of the supercharger stations. Now anyone in the Netherlands with an electric vehicle can establish an account with Tesla through the company's mobile app uh A, establish a payment method in the app, and they use a selection called charge your Non Tesla, which will then give them directions to a participating supercharger station and they pay through the app. There are a few other steps for non Tesla drivers. The supercharger stations were made to be compatible with Tesla vehicles, and with a Tesla car, it's essentially plug in play. You plug it in, it does everything on its own. It automatically shuts off when it's done charging. But for non Tesla evs, users will actually have to indicate in the app when the charging station should begin charging the car and when it should stop. It will also cost non Tesla drivers a bit more to do it than Tesla owners will have to pay. Now, will we see the same sort of program rolled out in the United States. In order for that to happen, we would need some special adapters because here in the States, Tesla has proprietary connectors that means no other EV company makes a port that fits the Tesla a charging system, but the company has indicated that this is the way of the future. So I suspect we'll see Tesla offering up adapters, you know, for a fee, of course, so that EV drivers in the US will be able to take advantage of supercharger locations whenever the company chooses to make that available, and that will be a good thing because it will extend the driving range of electric vehicles effectively, like you don't have to search around for a charging station if you have an app that tells you where the next one is, that's really useful. Back in two thousand sixteen, Dell, the computer company that was made famous in my childhood with the marketing phrase dude, you're getting a Dell, merged with a company that's called e m C. And as a result of that merger, the virtualization and cloud computing company vm ware essentially came along for the ride, with Dell gaining more than eight percent ownership of vm ware. But over the last few years, Dell has begun to spin off some of its acquired properties, mostly in an effort to manage debt. Vm Where is the latest of those spinoffs, and now Dell has divested itself of its more than ownership of vm Ware, and vm Ware is an independent company. Vm Ware's CEO UM released a statement that says, quote as a standalone company, we now have the flexibility to partner even more deeply with all cloud and on premises infrastructure companies to create a better foundation that drives results for our customers. Today's move will strengthen our mission to be the Switzerland of the cloud computing industry end quote which cool. Last month I talked about how US telecom companies are to remove Huahwei equipment from their networks, which is a directive from the United States government. Last Friday, that effort began in earnest as the FCC launched a reimbursement program. This will allow telecom companies to seek financial assistance to actually make this happen, because it's a pretty tricky thing to do, particularly if you want to avoid interruptions in service when you've got a network with all these pieces that are working together. Removing pieces after they're all integrated is not the easiest thing in the world to do. However, once these companies get a check, well, the timers starts for them, because the rules state that the companies that receive financial assistance have a year to remove network components once those checks come in. These are networks components supplied by Huawei as well as a second Chinese company called Zte corp Or Corporation. And you might wonder, well, why is this even happening in the first place, And it's largely concerned about national security. China has been responsible for and home to many surveillance and espionage efforts against other nations, particularly the United States, and it's pretty well known that China's government funds hacker groups to target US based businesses and institutions. And so the thinking goes, it might not be a great idea to rely upon critical network infrastructure that came out of China. As you know, it's it's possible that Chinese companies have built in ways in which these companies could perform espionage duties on behalf of the Chinese government. Um And I should add that the companies deny that this would be the case, But then, considering the amount of influence China's government has on Chinese companies, it could be a little difficult to accept that claim. We've got a few more stories, but we're gonna take one more break and we'll be right back. Okay, we left off in China. Let's go back to China, because that's where Yahoo has called it quits. And some of you might even be surprised that Yahoo is still a thing, because that company had its own dramatic rise and fall and sort of was scavenged from the wreckage. But yeah, it was operating in China. But over the years, in fact, since like two thousand thirteen or so, Yeahoo had been shutting down services in that country, and now it has ended all operations in China, stating that the move is quote in recognition of the increasingly challenging business and legal environment end quote, which is a very polite way of saying that it's incredibly hard to do business in China for many reasons, especially in the tech industry, and most of the reasons get pretty ugly when you start digging down. For example, China's government has been passing legislation that puts tight restrictions on tech companies and limiting their services dramatically. Many of these regulations restrict how and when Chinese citizens can access tech services. China's government states it's cracking down on practices that could tend towards monopolistic control of a particular industry or field. And I can get behind the idea that we should not allow monopolies to happen, but in the case of China, it's hard not to view the government itself as wanting to hold monopolistic control of pretty much everything, at least as far as what citizens can access. So in other words, I guess there's not really any good guys here. And while China has an enormous population and thus a potentially huge market, these increased regulations and restrictions have convinced more than a few companies to abandon operations in China as it has started to get to be more trouble than what it's worth, which is mind blowing, right. You think about more than a billion people live there and for that to be more trouble than what it's worth and to pull out, that's a lot of trouble, y'all, because that's a lot of money left on the table. Gamers who love hedgehogs might be excited to learn that Sega, the Japanese video game company famous for Sonic in the Hedgehog, announced it was forming a strategic alliance with Microsoft by leveraging Microsoft's Azure program. So Azure is a cloud computing service and it's typically used to develop and manage apps. Sega's plan is to form a new process when it comes to game development. Sega has an initiative called super Game and this is part of it. It's really an incredible effort to overhaul how the company i dates and develops games and to tap into the potential of five G connectivity. So there's been the tendency toward cloud gaming over the last couple of years, and what was at first a really jan Kee experiences gradually evolved and Sega is banking on the gaming of the future to be largely mobile and connected, and so the company is leaning on a cloud based service like Azure, which makes sense. The website nicaia Asia reports that Nintendo will produce twenty fewer Nintendo Switch consoles for fiscal year one than was originally predicted. And for Nintendo, the fiscal year ends in March, so March. Of the reason for the decline isn't due to decreased demand, but rather to the ongoing semiconductor chip shortage. The original plan was for Nintendo to produce as many as thirty million Switch consoles, but the final number will be closer to twenty four million. And this is a pretty tough story. I mean, the company has seen declining sales of the Switch, but the demand for the console is still super high. So that means the reason for the decline in sales is largely issues with production. If the company could just ramp up production, those sales numbers would likely be going in the opposite direction. This is a strong example of how supply chain issues can have huge impacts on company performance, not just for video game consoles, but for everything from computers to graphics cards to cars. In News of the Obvious, the Squid cryptocurrency, supposedly tying into the popular Squid game TV series from Korea has turned out to be a scam. Now, I say that it's news of the obvious because when it comes to red flags, the Squid cryptocurrency really took the cake. For one thing, you could buy squid currency, but you couldn't sell it. That's kind of weird, right, I Mean then you're like, well, how is this a commodity? I mean, how is it an actual cryptocurrency? If you can only exchange it in one direction with real currency for the squid based currency. That should have been a huge red flag right away. On top of that, the website promoting squid said the crypto was going to be used in an online game that was inspired by the TV series where people play various childlike games but for very very high stakes, So you could purchase these cryptocurrency tokens, and then the idea was he would use these tokens inside this online game. But the site also that was promoting this also had tons of spelling errors in it, and that at least suggested that the people who were behind it were not being terribly careful in setting it up, which is another big red flag. Well, the creators of this supposed cryptocurrency took the money and then they ran. The value had gone up to nearly three thousand dollars per squid unit, and that's when the scam artists pulled the plug. They pulled all their money out of it, probably fearing that their ruse would be discovered before they could cash out, and then the value of squid went from being nearly three grand a unit to a big old fat goose egg that is zero. So the con artists. They made off with a couple of million dollars of real money. Keep in mind, this is like a fake cryptocurrency, so it's not like they were able to cash out their cryptocurrency and get all that value back. The value, or the perceived value anyway, was probably in the you know, dozens of not hundreds of millions of dollars, but they just took the real money and ran with it. So this was a heck of an attack of opportunity. The hucksters tapped into a love of a popular TV series, the desire to virtually play in Squid Game, which I mean, if you've seen the show, you would know that the only way you would want to play is virtually and also depended upon the general ignorance that folks have about cryptocurrency. Now, I hope none of you got pulled into this scam now, just in case it did happen to you, Like that sucks, but don't feel like terrible about it. I have done some monumentally dumb things in the past when my enthusiasm got the better of me, where I got so excited about something I failed to really think about what I was doing, and I ended up paying the price later. So I am not immune to this kind of thing. I don't mean to suggest that I'm above it all. It's why I actually mentioned critical thinking so often in this this podcast. It's not just to tell you to use critical thinking. It's also to remind me that I need to do the same. Finally, do you remember the rewind videos that YouTube used to make. They started doing them in two thousand eleven, crafting ah from two thousand eleven two thousand eighteen. It was kind of a montage set to music. They would feature some of the most popular YouTube creators and channels in a video celebrating the year, and it would have like a loose thematic link between the creators, often grouping tons of people who otherwise never interacted with each other. They just all made popular videos, all being like in a bus or something. Um well, they didn't do one in because, you know, was a total bust. Plus getting a bunch of people together for a complicate did choreograph video shoot probably sounded like a bad idea during a pandemic. Now YouTube says that it's not gonna do rewind videos moving forward. It is made its last one. By the way, the two thousand uh nineteen rewind video was slightly different from the ones from two thousand eleven to two thousand eighteen. That's because two thousand eighteen was received so poorly. It became the most down voted video of all time within one week of it being up, largely because there were certain people who were left out of the video. Some of them I think should have been left out of the video because they are reprehensible people. But they still have lots and lots and lots of fans who disagree with me, and they made that disagreement known by downloding the video. So two thousand nineteen they said, okay, you know what message received, We're just gonna make a video that features some of the videos that got the most likes. So literally, you chose these videos. It's not on us have fun while we're not even doing that anymore. And it's largely because YouTube has grown so large and videos are so diverse across so many different genres and topics that it is literally impossible to make a rewind video that even represents a fraction of what is going on on YouTube that if you were to try and do it, unless that video was, you know, eighteen hours long, and featured flashes that lasted maybe a couple of seconds of each person. You wouldn't even scratch the surface. So instead YouTube says we're going to leave that to individual creators to make their own kind of rewind videos to be a reflection on the year. But we're not gonna do it anymore. And I mean it makes sense to me, Like you look at YouTube and you start to forget all the different content that's on there, because like if if you're like me, you start to kind of narrow in on the content you like, and you your mind forgets that everything else is on there too. I mean everything like d I O. Y guides to critical analysis of the cultural appropriation and Disney films too, comedy videos that I have to admit I am too old to find funny two recipe videos that are far more useful than recipes you find online because you don't have to wade through a novel before you get to the recipe. So I understand where YouTube's coming from, but I think we should have a moment of silence for rewind two thousand eleven to two thousand nineteen. That's enough silence, Okay. That wraps up the news items for Tuesday, November two, two thousand twenty one. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover on tech Stuff, reach out and let me know what those are. The best way to do that is on Twitter and the handle for the show is text Stuffs H. S W. And I'll talk to you again really soon. Yeah. 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, joth In Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and I love all things tech. It is time for the tech news for Tuesday, November two, twenty one, and we're gonna start off with some old news because didn't do a news episode last Thursday. And as predicted Facebook, the company has changed its name to Meta, which is pretty much in line with what The Verge predicted a couple of weeks ago. Meta in this case is a reference to the concept of a metaverse, which in turn we typically envision as being an implementation of such things as virtual reality and augmented reality, and a persistent online virtual world where you can behave as if it were the real world. You can, you know, do things like shopping, you can have entertainment. Essentially, you have this online, persistent world that in some ways mirrors the real one, except of course you're not burdened by reality. Right, So in the metaverse, you might have an entire social structure that exists inside this virtual world, and you might have some elements of that environment spill out into the real world through stuff like augmented reality technology. So in a way, it's an extension of the concept of social networks, only they become even more immersive. Anyway, I'm sure you're all aware of the name change by now. There's very little chance that I'm telling you this for the first time. Of course, Meta is still going to face a lot of questions from political leaders around the world. A name change is not magically going to make all the critics who want to split the company up say, oh, well, Facebook's gone now. I mean, Facebook the platform is still there, but Facebook the company's gone. We're not, and I don't think that's going to happen. And I suspect as leaders get their heads wrapped around what a metaverse actually is and how it would enable a company like you know, former Facebook now Meta to track even more information about people. There's going to be more questions, or at least I hope there will be. NBC News reports that an internal blog post at what was then Facebook and now as Meta. This is just going to be tiresome anyway, It revealed that the company was actively pursuing opportunities to market to kids, kids as young as six years old. In fact, the blog post identified five different age groups that the company was you know, kind of delineating as targets. They had the six to nine age group, ten to twelve, thirteen to fifteen, sixteen to seventeen, and then everybody else. And I should add that this blog post specifically mentioned stuff like making sure the company protected the security and privacy of users, So at least there's that like this was an internal blog post, it wasn't outward facing. The fact that they even mentioned that we need to do this in a responsible way is at least somewhat comforting, I guess, But I would say this is more grist for the mill when it comes to scrutinizing this enormous company and it's various strategies involving user experiences and more importantly, how the company generates revenue based on user behaviors and how much data they are collecting from users. Now, as I mentioned last week, the Facebook platform itself has seen a decline in use among younger folks, and so this is likely part of the company's overall strategy to find ways to attract new users, not necessarily to the Facebook platform, although I'm sure that's part of it. But you know to the company's services. Overall, Facebook reps defended the blog post. They argued that really, any business that interfaces with the public is always trying to attract new and younger people all the time. Like, if you get people, you know, to connect with your product at a young age, you might have a customer for life. So in that sense, yeah, that that really does make sense. And in fact, Facebook said the only thing that would be newsworthy is if the company wasn't doing this. However, I would add it is a little creepy when you think that as a kind of preventive measure, Facebook said, an age limit on who could have a Facebook or an Instagram profile, you know, you have to be thirteen or older. And that seems like it's a tacit acknowledgement that the services the company provides might not be a good fit for younger users. And when you take the blog post in concert with the thousands of other documents that have emerged thanks to whistleblower Francis Hogan, it all starts to look a little sinister. So yeah, I guess companies that are you know, in the business of dealing with you know, the average consumer are always looking to find a way of tapping into that at a young or age. But um, that doesn't mean it's always good. I mean I could easily point to the case of say, cigarette companies using cartoonish mascots to market their cigarettes and how that is not really a good thing. But we'll leave it for here. Now let's talk about data tracking for a second. So Apple introduced the App Tracking Transparency Policy last year, and this policy sets firm rules that iOS apps must follow. That is, apps that appear on Apple's app stores have to follow these rules or else Apple won't carry them. So, if the app is tracking data in any way, it first has to request user permission to do so and to talk about which types of of data it intends to track. So if a user says no thanks, then the app is not allowed to track that data. To say that some companies were upset about this would be underplaying it. I mean. Facebook went so far as to take out a full page newspaper ad arguing against the policy, saying that you know it would interfere with the Facebook apps performance and give users the mistaken impression that you know, Facebook is collecting loads of private information or to monetize the info which was actually the correct implication because that is what the company does well. Now. The Financial Times reports that companies like you know, Meta Slash, Facebook and Snap and Twitter and YouTube lost nearly ten billion dollars last year due to this policy, and by lost, I mean they weren't able to capitalize on user data for those users who opted out of the data tracking. Snap was hit particularly hard, which is not a big surprise because Snap does not exist outside of the mobile experience. Right There's no desktop version for Snapchat, so that would explain how that company was hit particularly hard because there no other platform for it to depend upon. Uh. Interestingly, Apple itself has been found to engage in practices that break its own rules, so you know, I'm not giving Apple a full pass on this one. I think that the policy is a good one, but only if everybody be behaves and everyone follows it, you know, Apple included. But it does also show a couple of things. And one, it shows that your data is valuable, so you should think about treating it as such, that it has value, and so think about that, you know, take value in it. There are people who have proposed systems that would require companies to pay folks directly in order to be able to use their data. That's how valuable. It is. Not that those policies have actually, you know, seen any real traction, because companies obviously have a strong incentive to resist that, but it shows how how valuable the data is too. This shows these apps are tracking you in tons of different ways, and those ways might relate back to the way the app functions, So there could be some legit arguments that the data tracking is necessary in order for you to have full functionality of the app. But this also reminds us that our phones are constantly data gathering machines. Sin since we pretty much take them everywhere we go, it means we're always being tracked, and the stuff we do is being tracked. The stuff we look up on our phones is being tracked. Just good to remember, you know. Fun times Up in Oregon, in the Pacific Northwest in the United States, there's a bit of a brew haha going on regarding Google and its use of water near the city of the Dowells. That's two words, It's the and dows d A L L. E. S. Actually had to look up how to say that so I wouldn't get the pronunciation wrong. Google has data centers in the Dowells on a site of an old aluminum smelting facility that closed down years ago, like in the eighties, uh, and they built data centers there, and the company plans to build a couple more of those massive data centers. Well, you know, buildings that are filled with computers that are running all the time get pretty hot and you have to keep computers from overheating or else stuff breaks down. So as part of this plan, Google negotiated with the city council of the Dolls and they got a new deal when it comes to water rights. You know, Google uses water to pull heat away from these computers and then through a heat exchanger, cools the heated water back down and can recirculate it through the system in order to keep things at a good operating temperature. Although it does mean that they have to occasionally bring in more water, so it's like a water cooled BC, only on an epic scale. Anyway, this would mean Google would have to collect more water from the area, and it's an area that's also been hit with droughts in the recent past, so this has led some residents to become a bit concerned over the matter, and making it worse is that the amount of water that Google wants is a secret. According to the City of the Dolls, Google's request constitutes a trade secret, and so the city is not allowed to share the information with residents. So the city council knows, but they can't tell. According to other entities in Oregon, the use of water is a matter of public interest and that supersedes any trade secret. Moreover, those people who are concerned have pointed out that Google doesn't provide information about how much water it needs because the city has an information. They know how much water Google needs, and that means that the city is refusing to share information with the citizens of the city. The newspaper the Oregonians sued to get access to that information, and a judge sided with the newspaper, But now the city has countersued the newspaper in order to keep the information secret. Meanwhile, there's a vote coming up on the matter, and a vote that's really only open to the city council members, not the public, and there's no chance that this particular legal matter will be resolved before the vote happens. So things, as you might imagine, are a little bit tense up in the dolls. The city council says that Google's plan will actually mean the more water will be provided to the city, because Google will be contributing nearly thirty million dollars to expand water services for the area. But the secrecy around how much water the company needs seems to be feeding into a general distrust of Google and the city council, at least according to a piece I read on Oregon Live dot com. We've got some more stories to cover, but before we get to that, let's take a quick break. Before the break, I was talking about Google and Oregon. I've got another Google story here, which involves a worker petition that's aimed at convincing both Google and Amazon to back out of a deal that the companies have made with is Real. The deal is called Project Nimbus, and as you might suspect with that name, it involves cloud computing centers. The workers who are leading the petition are two Jewish Google employees, and they're worried that the cloud computing tech quote allows for further surveillance of an unlawful data collection on Palestinians and facilitates expansion of Israel's illegal settlements on the Palestinian land end quote, and the two say that more than one thousand employees have signed a petition, though the petition itself allows employees to remain anonymous, and all but three have done so, so it's obviously hard to verify. According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the cloud computing contract has clauses in it that are meant to prevent Amazon and Google from pulling out of the deal, even if they're under the threat of boycott, so it's questionable whether the petition will make any headway, though it does bring more attention to the project. Last week, I talked about how Hurts, the rental car company, had signed a deal with Tesla to buy one hundred thousand Tesla vehicles by the end of next year. Well Elon Musk then went out and tweeted that the ink has not even been put to paper yet, that no contract has been signed, which, hey, you know, woopsie, because you know, the initial news about that deal pushed Tesla stock value up more than ten percent, like around twelve percent actually, so that means if you had Tesla stock, you potentially could have seen your wealth increase pretty dramatically before Musk revealed that the deal hadn't actually been done yet, which you know, elon Musk and the stock market, there are all these stories that don't paint Musk in a very good light in the way he communicates things. Um. But then, to be fair, if the contract wasn't signed and someone claimed that it was, it's not really on Musk's shoulders this time. But yeah, stock markets are fun, and by fun I mean we all play pretend and hoping you make money. A Hurts, by the way, is still communicating as though this has been a done deal for some time. In fact, the company had told the BBC that Hurts is already receiving deliveries of Tesla vehicles, so that's kind of weird, right. Hurts was directly asked by the BBC if the contract was in fact signed, and a rep said, oh, we don't comment on business dealings to the press. Yeah, okay. Tesla is also opening up a program in the Netherlands that will help people with e vs UH for the first time evs, by the way, electric vehicles for the first time. Tesla is opening up ten supercharger locations in the Netherlands to people who are driving any type of electric vehicle not just Tesla vehicles. Previously, you needed to be driving a Tesla in order to make use of the supercharger stations. Now anyone in the Netherlands with an electric vehicle can establish an account with Tesla through the company's mobile app uh A, establish a payment method in the app, and they use a selection called charge your Non Tesla, which will then give them directions to a participating supercharger station and they pay through the app. There are a few other steps for non Tesla drivers. The supercharger stations were made to be compatible with Tesla vehicles, and with a Tesla car, it's essentially plug in play. You plug it in, it does everything on its own. It automatically shuts off when it's done charging. But for non Tesla evs, users will actually have to indicate in the app when the charging station should begin charging the car and when it should stop. It will also cost non Tesla drivers a bit more to do it than Tesla owners will have to pay. Now, will we see the same sort of program rolled out in the United States. In order for that to happen, we would need some special adapters because here in the States, Tesla has proprietary connectors that means no other EV company makes a port that fits the Tesla a charging system, but the company has indicated that this is the way of the future. So I suspect we'll see Tesla offering up adapters, you know, for a fee, of course, so that EV drivers in the US will be able to take advantage of supercharger locations whenever the company chooses to make that available, and that will be a good thing because it will extend the driving range of electric vehicles effectively, like you don't have to search around for a charging station if you have an app that tells you where the next one is, that's really useful. Back in two thousand sixteen, Dell, the computer company that was made famous in my childhood with the marketing phrase dude, you're getting a Dell, merged with a company that's called e m C. And as a result of that merger, the virtualization and cloud computing company vm ware essentially came along for the ride, with Dell gaining more than eight percent ownership of vm ware. But over the last few years, Dell has begun to spin off some of its acquired properties, mostly in an effort to manage debt. Vm Where is the latest of those spinoffs, and now Dell has divested itself of its more than ownership of vm Ware, and vm Ware is an independent company. Vm Ware's CEO UM released a statement that says, quote as a standalone company, we now have the flexibility to partner even more deeply with all cloud and on premises infrastructure companies to create a better foundation that drives results for our customers. Today's move will strengthen our mission to be the Switzerland of the cloud computing industry end quote which cool. Last month I talked about how US telecom companies are to remove Huahwei equipment from their networks, which is a directive from the United States government. Last Friday, that effort began in earnest as the FCC launched a reimbursement program. This will allow telecom companies to seek financial assistance to actually make this happen, because it's a pretty tricky thing to do, particularly if you want to avoid interruptions in service when you've got a network with all these pieces that are working together. Removing pieces after they're all integrated is not the easiest thing in the world to do. However, once these companies get a check, well, the timers starts for them, because the rules state that the companies that receive financial assistance have a year to remove network components once those checks come in. These are networks components supplied by Huawei as well as a second Chinese company called Zte corp Or Corporation. And you might wonder, well, why is this even happening in the first place, And it's largely concerned about national security. China has been responsible for and home to many surveillance and espionage efforts against other nations, particularly the United States, and it's pretty well known that China's government funds hacker groups to target US based businesses and institutions. And so the thinking goes, it might not be a great idea to rely upon critical network infrastructure that came out of China. As you know, it's it's possible that Chinese companies have built in ways in which these companies could perform espionage duties on behalf of the Chinese government. Um And I should add that the companies deny that this would be the case, But then, considering the amount of influence China's government has on Chinese companies, it could be a little difficult to accept that claim. We've got a few more stories, but we're gonna take one more break and we'll be right back. Okay, we left off in China. Let's go back to China, because that's where Yahoo has called it quits. And some of you might even be surprised that Yahoo is still a thing, because that company had its own dramatic rise and fall and sort of was scavenged from the wreckage. But yeah, it was operating in China. But over the years, in fact, since like two thousand thirteen or so, Yeahoo had been shutting down services in that country, and now it has ended all operations in China, stating that the move is quote in recognition of the increasingly challenging business and legal environment end quote, which is a very polite way of saying that it's incredibly hard to do business in China for many reasons, especially in the tech industry, and most of the reasons get pretty ugly when you start digging down. For example, China's government has been passing legislation that puts tight restrictions on tech companies and limiting their services dramatically. Many of these regulations restrict how and when Chinese citizens can access tech services. China's government states it's cracking down on practices that could tend towards monopolistic control of a particular industry or field. And I can get behind the idea that we should not allow monopolies to happen, but in the case of China, it's hard not to view the government itself as wanting to hold monopolistic control of pretty much everything, at least as far as what citizens can access. So in other words, I guess there's not really any good guys here. And while China has an enormous population and thus a potentially huge market, these increased regulations and restrictions have convinced more than a few companies to abandon operations in China as it has started to get to be more trouble than what it's worth, which is mind blowing, right. You think about more than a billion people live there and for that to be more trouble than what it's worth and to pull out, that's a lot of trouble, y'all, because that's a lot of money left on the table. Gamers who love hedgehogs might be excited to learn that Sega, the Japanese video game company famous for Sonic in the Hedgehog, announced it was forming a strategic alliance with Microsoft by leveraging Microsoft's Azure program. So Azure is a cloud computing service and it's typically used to develop and manage apps. Sega's plan is to form a new process when it comes to game development. Sega has an initiative called super Game and this is part of it. It's really an incredible effort to overhaul how the company i dates and develops games and to tap into the potential of five G connectivity. So there's been the tendency toward cloud gaming over the last couple of years, and what was at first a really jan Kee experiences gradually evolved and Sega is banking on the gaming of the future to be largely mobile and connected, and so the company is leaning on a cloud based service like Azure, which makes sense. The website nicaia Asia reports that Nintendo will produce twenty fewer Nintendo Switch consoles for fiscal year one than was originally predicted. And for Nintendo, the fiscal year ends in March, so March. Of the reason for the decline isn't due to decreased demand, but rather to the ongoing semiconductor chip shortage. The original plan was for Nintendo to produce as many as thirty million Switch consoles, but the final number will be closer to twenty four million. And this is a pretty tough story. I mean, the company has seen declining sales of the Switch, but the demand for the console is still super high. So that means the reason for the decline in sales is largely issues with production. If the company could just ramp up production, those sales numbers would likely be going in the opposite direction. This is a strong example of how supply chain issues can have huge impacts on company performance, not just for video game consoles, but for everything from computers to graphics cards to cars. In News of the Obvious, the Squid cryptocurrency, supposedly tying into the popular Squid game TV series from Korea has turned out to be a scam. Now, I say that it's news of the obvious because when it comes to red flags, the Squid cryptocurrency really took the cake. For one thing, you could buy squid currency, but you couldn't sell it. That's kind of weird, right, I Mean then you're like, well, how is this a commodity? I mean, how is it an actual cryptocurrency? If you can only exchange it in one direction with real currency for the squid based currency. That should have been a huge red flag right away. On top of that, the website promoting squid said the crypto was going to be used in an online game that was inspired by the TV series where people play various childlike games but for very very high stakes, So you could purchase these cryptocurrency tokens, and then the idea was he would use these tokens inside this online game. But the site also that was promoting this also had tons of spelling errors in it, and that at least suggested that the people who were behind it were not being terribly careful in setting it up, which is another big red flag. Well, the creators of this supposed cryptocurrency took the money and then they ran. The value had gone up to nearly three thousand dollars per squid unit, and that's when the scam artists pulled the plug. They pulled all their money out of it, probably fearing that their ruse would be discovered before they could cash out, and then the value of squid went from being nearly three grand a unit to a big old fat goose egg that is zero. So the con artists. They made off with a couple of million dollars of real money. Keep in mind, this is like a fake cryptocurrency, so it's not like they were able to cash out their cryptocurrency and get all that value back. The value, or the perceived value anyway, was probably in the you know, dozens of not hundreds of millions of dollars, but they just took the real money and ran with it. So this was a heck of an attack of opportunity. The hucksters tapped into a love of a popular TV series, the desire to virtually play in Squid Game, which I mean, if you've seen the show, you would know that the only way you would want to play is virtually and also depended upon the general ignorance that folks have about cryptocurrency. Now, I hope none of you got pulled into this scam now, just in case it did happen to you, Like that sucks, but don't feel like terrible about it. I have done some monumentally dumb things in the past when my enthusiasm got the better of me, where I got so excited about something I failed to really think about what I was doing, and I ended up paying the price later. So I am not immune to this kind of thing. I don't mean to suggest that I'm above it all. It's why I actually mentioned critical thinking so often in this this podcast. It's not just to tell you to use critical thinking. It's also to remind me that I need to do the same. Finally, do you remember the rewind videos that YouTube used to make. They started doing them in two thousand eleven, crafting ah from two thousand eleven two thousand eighteen. It was kind of a montage set to music. They would feature some of the most popular YouTube creators and channels in a video celebrating the year, and it would have like a loose thematic link between the creators, often grouping tons of people who otherwise never interacted with each other. They just all made popular videos, all being like in a bus or something. Um well, they didn't do one in because, you know, was a total bust. Plus getting a bunch of people together for a complicate did choreograph video shoot probably sounded like a bad idea during a pandemic. Now YouTube says that it's not gonna do rewind videos moving forward. It is made its last one. By the way, the two thousand uh nineteen rewind video was slightly different from the ones from two thousand eleven to two thousand eighteen. That's because two thousand eighteen was received so poorly. It became the most down voted video of all time within one week of it being up, largely because there were certain people who were left out of the video. Some of them I think should have been left out of the video because they are reprehensible people. But they still have lots and lots and lots of fans who disagree with me, and they made that disagreement known by downloding the video. So two thousand nineteen they said, okay, you know what message received, We're just gonna make a video that features some of the videos that got the most likes. So literally, you chose these videos. It's not on us have fun while we're not even doing that anymore. And it's largely because YouTube has grown so large and videos are so diverse across so many different genres and topics that it is literally impossible to make a rewind video that even represents a fraction of what is going on on YouTube that if you were to try and do it, unless that video was, you know, eighteen hours long, and featured flashes that lasted maybe a couple of seconds of each person. You wouldn't even scratch the surface. So instead YouTube says we're going to leave that to individual creators to make their own kind of rewind videos to be a reflection on the year. But we're not gonna do it anymore. And I mean it makes sense to me, Like you look at YouTube and you start to forget all the different content that's on there, because like if if you're like me, you start to kind of narrow in on the content you like, and you your mind forgets that everything else is on there too. I mean everything like d I O. Y guides to critical analysis of the cultural appropriation and Disney films too, comedy videos that I have to admit I am too old to find funny two recipe videos that are far more useful than recipes you find online because you don't have to wade through a novel before you get to the recipe. So I understand where YouTube's coming from, but I think we should have a moment of silence for rewind two thousand eleven to two thousand nineteen. That's enough silence, Okay. That wraps up the news items for Tuesday, November two, two thousand twenty one. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover on tech Stuff, reach out and let me know what those are. The best way to do that is on Twitter and the handle for the show is text Stuffs H. S W. And I'll talk to you again really soon. Yeah. 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.