Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tex Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and a lot of all things tech. And this is the Tech News for Thursday, September twenty one. And our first story is a big one. It's probably gonna take the whole first section because there's a lot to say, and then there's Jonathan's take on it as well, So let's get to it. The Wall Street Journal published an article this week revealing that their journalists got to see a report about Instagram that is concerning, to say the least, while also confirming a lot of commonly held suspicions. Now, I think most of us have at least a sense that social media can lead us to place unrealistic expectations on us in the lives we lead. A lot of people have written or talked about the tendency for folks to put forward an idealized version of themselves online, like it's not the real them, it's an idealized version of them. It makes their lives out to seem more dramatic, more exciting, and lush than they really are, and Instagram, but it's focus on pictures is particularly bad about this. A picture tells a thousand words, but you know, a lot of those words tend to be Look how awesome I am, or how awesome my house is, or how awesome this vacation spot is now. Facebook representatives, including Mark Zuckerberg himself, have frequently told the public and the United States Congress that the benefits of social media include a boost to mental health because they allow us to be part of communities and to connect with people that we care about. And that narrative might seem fairly convincing, particularly during COVID times when a lot of us have had few or possibly no opportunities to see people we used to hang out with, you know, before COVID. But the report that Wall Street saw confirmed suspicions that Instagram can have devastatingly harmful effects to mental health, particularly for teenage girls. And this report didn't come from some third party research group that you might suspect was applying confirmation bias to the investigation. By that, I mean if you have a group that has an agenda like they expect to find something bad, then they often will look for something bad, and they'll ignore anything that is contrary to that particular you know, sort of prejudice. But in this case, the investigation report came from inside Facebook itself. Researchers in the company studied the effects of Instagram on behavior and mental health and found that nearly a third of all teenage girls who are on Instagram traced serious issues with self image, confidence, and mental health to their participation with Instagram. So let's make some very rough estimates here, just again idea of how many people we could be talking about. So Instagram reportedly has around one billion users. That's billion with a B. Now, more than of those users are no older than twenty two. That's more than but let's just cut it at that gives us four million users who are twenty two or younger. Now, let's assume about half of those are women. Statistic, by the way, estimates that women make up more than it's more like fifty one. But we're doing kind of a pen on a napkin style estimation here. So that means two hundred million young women and girls are using Instagram. Now, let's say that of that number are older than teenagers. Okay, so one fifth of that number. This is just me saying this that one fifth of them are aged twenty or older. That's probably a generous estimate. It's probably fewer than that, but I'm just doing this for the purposes of illustrations. That would leave us with one sixty million teenage girls. And the report said that around thirty two of the girls that were you know, part of the study said they ended up experiencing a negative impact on their mental health that they attributed to their participation on Instagram. So that means more than if we apply this across the board and say that is representative, that would mean that more than fifty one million teenage girls could be struggling with mental health problems. They're the very least exacerbated by their time on Instagram. By the way, it gets worse. Those mental health issues can ripple into other dangerous and catastrophic consequences, everything from developing eating disorders or even leading to suicidal thoughts. Fifty one million teenage girls, and again that's a rough estimate, and I took some pretty conservative shortcuts getting there. Okay, so what's actually leading to the issues that we're seeing with mental health? One possible contributor, and again we're talking about possibilities. Here would be a tendency called social comparison, and that's exactly what sounds like. It's when you see the depiction of someone else's life and then you compare your own life to that person's life, and you come back with like a negative feeling about your own situation. So maybe it's an influencer who looks like they're in phenomenal shape. This happened to me. I'm not a teenage girl. I'm a middle aged man. But when I started on my fitness journey, which I totally have fallen off of because COVID and then a lack of resolve I'll say on my part. Anyway, when I was on that journey, I actually looked at some Instagram accounts that were about fitness, which meant that Instagram was serving up tons of different pictures of people who were insane shape. I mean Greek statues would be jealous of them, uh. And so I was inundated with images of people who were in much better shape than I was, some of which appeared to suggest that they got there in a very short amount of time. Obviously, this stuff can be rather than motivating, discouraging, right, Like if I'm seeing people who are like, yeah, you just must not be doing it right because I got to where I am in three weeks or something like that, some ludicrous explanation that can be very discouraging to me. Well, that's just one example. Or maybe the influencer is wearing designer clothing. Maybe they're hanging out in gorgeous locations. I mean, how many times have you opened Instagram and just browse stuff and saw incredibly hot people hanging out on yachts or by pools and stuff like that. In fact, I mentioned influencers. We do have an entire profession called influencer that is geared toward that kind of experience to project this pick sure of idealization, and their whole job is to influence you, to convince you that they're living out their best life and that they're being showered with amazing products and trips and stuff, and that your life could be better if it was more like their life. And then you've got the issue with people getting obsessed over numbers on Instagram, like how many followers they might have, or how many likes a post gets or how many comments of post receives. And again, if we look at influencers, we see them constantly trying to prompt engagement, often by including sort of some sort of question as a caption for a photo. So I happen to really like cool cosplay. Instagram profiles people who put in tons of work and make incredible costumes, so I get a mix of all sorts of cosplayers served up. Now, some of these cosplayers, will you know, end up posting provocative images, maybe something a bit steamy. Right. Then they'll include a caption that might say something like cheezburgers or hot dogs, which could possibly have nothing to do with the image itself, but that gets people commenting, because increased engagement is currency for influencers. Heck, I remember when some influencers were using the trick of spell out such and such in the comments letter by letter, meaning that you would post each letter in order as a separate post as a separate comment in order to prove something. I guess that was really just a trick to kind of get more comments, because if you get a high comment count as an influencer, your price tag starts to go up for brands. Right. Meanwhile, people who are comparing themselves against these sorts of influencers may start to feel really badly about themselves, like they're not popular, that something's wrong with them, and Instagram reinforces that experience again and again. Worse, Instagram has a vicious cycle built into it because so many young people use Instagram to interact with their peers. It's almost as if being on the platform is necessary just to take part in socialization with your peer group, and the experience, even when negative, can lead to compulsive use of the platform. It's like, you can't quit it because you need it. Now, I'm not just spouting off my own opinions here, although I'm doing a bit of that too. According to The Wall Street Journal, that internal report that Facebook researchers generated backs a lot of this stuff up. The researchers generated that report back in the spring of twenty twenty. But wait, it gets worse because in the spring of this year, twenty twenty one, Mark Zuckerberg said at a congressional hearing that essentially their research indicated that social platforms like Instagram have a benefit of positive effect on mental health, which is the exact opposite of what this internal report found. Now, again, it's an internal report. Facebook did not share this outside the company, so I don't think you can say that Facebook in general, like executives in general, were on a aware of it. Possibly Zuckerberg was unaware of it. I mean, maybe this is like a case with Independence Day where the president isn't told about the alien at area fifty one for the purposes of plausible deniability. Maybe that happened. I doubt it, but maybe Anyway. Congress people had already remarked on how Zuckerberg seemed evasive when answering questions, like he was trying to find ways to talk around things without actually addressing them, and that had already raised concerns even before the existence of this report was known. But this report confirms that those concerns were well narrated and to make matters even worse. Even knowing this, even knowing the potentially disastrous effect the experience of being on Instagram can have on young people, Facebook has been hard at work to develop an aversion for Instagram for kids under the age of thirteen. Now, let that settle in for a bit. You have a company knowing that its product can have harmful effects on young girls, they have a whole report about it, and they're working to make a product for even younger ones. Also, I should add that while the report focuses on young girls, those are not the only people have a negative impact from this stuff. I mean, I just mentioned that I experienced this on a certain scale, so it can affect people of all genders and ages. The teen girls appear to be, you know, as a as a population, slightly more vulnerable to this sort of influence, but that doesn't mean they they're the only ones who end up feeling lesser than after spending time on Instagram. It happens to a lot of people. So then the question comes down to what is to be done about this? Now? I suspect that without intense external pressure, not much is going to change a Facebook and Instagram. Uh. Facebook really hasn't seemed to take any massive steps towards reducing the harm it causes unless public opinion, political pressure, or most effectively and most telling lee pressure from advertisers has forced it to do so. Facebook is a heck of an example of a capitalist organization gone to the extreme, in which the primary purpose of the organization is to return value to shareholders and everything else is secondary or maybe not even a consideration. That being said, democratic lawmakers here in the United States are starting to apply that kind of pressure right now. In fact, today they've been calling on Zuckerberg to give up on this idea of an Instagram app for kids. There's also talk of another massive investigation into the company, and armed with this internal report, I think Zuckerberg is destined for another very uncomfortable hearing in front of Congress. But for most of us, I think the study shows that parents really need to be aware of these influences and to take an active role in helping their children with stuff like self esteem and confidence, and an understanding that the representations we see of people online are often a fabrication and are not reflective of reality, nor are they reflective of a person's value. We need to educate everyone that the reason most of this content that falls into this kind of harmful tendency usually is meant to ultimately serve one of a couple of different purposes that are tightly related. Now, often it's all in the effort to sell you something. Now, it might be a specific branded product, or the thing on sale might actually be the brand of the person who's sharing the content themselves, or it could be to boost a person's status, essentially saying look and how amazing my life is because I'm the best. But either way, understanding that the images that you see are not necessarily showing you what's really going on, and also that the reason that these images exist is to push out a specific branding message, all of that is helpful. I mean, I see this everywhere obviously, like this this tendency, especially in relation to Instagram. It's everywhere, like there are plenty of pop up experiences that really only exist for the purposes of people to take selfies at them and to kind of generate this image of a fun experience. But the whole experience is just about taking those selfies. Like there's nothing, there's nothing more substantive to the experience that that's all it is. It's just surface level that in itself may not, you know, be harmful on the face of it, but it contributes to this tendency I'm talking about. Also, the report found that most other social platforms don't have nearly the same negative impact as Instagram. Stuff like TikTok tends to be focused more on performance than on appearance. Stuff on Snapchat tends to feature lots of ridiculous filters, and these things don't seem to contribute as much of a negative effect on mental health. So long long coverage of that one story. But I think this one is really important. I don't think it was quite enough for me to of a full episode dedicated to it unless I get an expert in, but I really wanted to talk about it because it's it's pretty damning that Facebook had its own internal report that said these things, and yet outwardly the company has behaved as if everything it does is fine, when that is patently not the case, and they know it, and that's the worst part. All Right, We're gonna go and take a break, and when we come back, we'll have some other unrelated tech news. On Tuesday's episode this week, I mentioned that Apple was about to hold its iPhone thirteen event, but at that point it had not yet done so as I was recording the show. Obviously it's happened since then, and some of you may know all about this, But really the big surprise at the event was that some of the stuff that was rumored to be featured, like a really big update to the Apple Watch and new air pods, uh, those actually weren't part of the show. I mean, there was a new Apple Watch, but the The big changes that had been rumored uh ended up being just a slightly larger screen and a couple of new features, but nothing like the redesign that folks were expecting. Uh, you know, nothing dramatic. The new watch looks fairly close to the previous ones. It's a little bigger with the screen, and the air pods with the rumored shorter stems were a no show at the event. There are also rumors about the iPhone itself, a big one being that Apple was going to build in some sort of satellite cell phone feature so that there would be a transmitter where you could actually make a satellite phone call if you had to. Now, you wouldn't normally use the satellite system. There are issues with latency. It tends to be a really expensive kind of thing to do. But according to these rumors, you would be able to make use of this feature if you happen to be in an area that had no cell service. So that way, if you need to make an emergency phone call but you weren't close to a cell tower or a WiFi hotspot, you can do it. But that ended up not being part of the announcements either. So what we did get were new iPhones with new A fifteen bionic chips powering them. That's a proprietary chip from Apple, a new dual camera system, and the two pro models support a one hurts refresh rate for the screen. Now that means that the screen refreshes on times per second. The iPad also got a facelift. But yeah, you know, the announcements were fairly modest in nature. Honestly, I wonder if it actually benefits Apple to keep holding these big marketing events unless there happens to be something that's going to really blow people's socks off, because the company set expectations ridiculously high with big reveals, you know, a decade ago or more, and now there's a tendency for folks to say, oh, that's it, even even if the stuff that Apple is showing is an improvement over previous models, because you know, it's not like a show stopper kind of thing. But hey, I mean, it's a two trillion dollar company and the folks running it are way smarter than I am, so I'm sure I'm just not seeing the big picture. In the past, I've talked about the N s O Group a few times on this show. That's the Israeli company famous for developing a malware tool that exploits security vulnerabilities and Apple's Eye message program. And just to be clear, that's not the only company to take aim at I message and create exploits. An American company called Acuvant once upon a time did the same thing. Now use the past tense here because Acuvant subsequently found itself absorbed into a larger company called Optive, and reportedly Optive is out of the exploit development game, but Acuvant was very much in that game, using security experts to not just find vulnerabilities in various software platforms, but to develop exploits that leveraged those vulnerabilities, then selling those as products to various other entities, usually government agencies. So while I heap a lot of criticism on n s O Group, which you know, does a similar thing with the blessing and restrictions of the Israeli government, we are seeing the same sort of thing going on in other parts of the world, including here in the United States. Anyway, I bring all this up because the m I T Technology Review reports that the U. S. Department of Justice recently find three former U S intelligence and military personnel for working for the United Arab Emirates without US permission in what was called Project Raven. The operatives were using this exploit, they had purchased it from Acuvant, and then they were acting as mercenaries. They were deploying the exploit on behalf of the U A E. And reportedly the list of targets included American citizens and companies. Uh. And you know that's a big no no working on behalf of a foreign government when you're a U. S citizen without you know, the consent of the United States government. The finds amounted to a little less than one point seven million dollars. I'm assuming that's collectively, but the m I T Technology Review Report was not specific, so to be clear, the focus here is on the three and that investigation, and there's not really any investigation into optave or the former equivant. So if you take it like that, you know, you could say, oh, well, the government says it's okay if for your companies to develop tools that specifically exploit some other company's product, you know, I message from Apple in this case, it's just not okay to take that same product and then work with a foreign government. Pretty weird world we live in anyway. I Message, as the Technology Review points out, is a very popular destination for malware because Apple includes it on every iPhone, so the install base is on every single iPhone that's out there and you can't uninstall it. Anyone using an iOS device with your phone number can send you a message on I Message, and I Message automatically accepts those incoming messages, doesn't matter if you don't recognize the number or not. So if you build in what's called a zero click exploit, that's an exploit that doesn't need someone to click on a link or open up a file or anything like that, it just infects malware as long as there's a hit. Well. That means you can have one of these compromise your phone just because you receive the message on I Message. Apple has patched the vulnerabilities and I Message a couple of times, including a patch called blast Door, but hackers are always looking for other cracks in the security around the app, and it's a constant seesaw battle between developers and hackers. In addition to that, one of those three people that have been fined by the US government for this thing is Daniel Garrick, who currently serves as the Chief Information Officer or c i O of Express VPN, now the v The end company says it was aware of Garrick's previous activities before they hired him, that he was completely transparent about that, and that might sound surprising, but then the company said that his experience was what made him valuable to the company. So VPNs, or virtual private networks, are a way for people to log into one system in order to access other systems privately. Uh Effectively, it masks your activities between you and whichever end server you're trying to access. The VPN is kind of like the man in the middle in this case, and they're you know, encrypting everything so that snoopers don't know what it is you're actually doing. Anyway, Express VPN's stance was that Garrick's experiences meant he understood security vulnerabilities because he had been searching for them and then exploiting them. So this could help the company build more effective tools to protect security and privacy, because who do you want on your team other than, you know, the person who knows how to break those thingsings And that definitely makes sense from that perspective. Now, the bit about him working as a mercenary for a foreign government seems a bit much to me, but I get the concept of wanting to find someone to put on your team who has experience of familiarity with exploits. A few weeks ago, I talked about how employees at Activision Blizzard had brought forth charges relating to a toxic work culture within the company and had been part of that company for years, including charges of sexual harassment and assault, as well as a tendency for the company to protect certain employees accused of perpetrating or encouraging some truly awful behavior. There are also charges of general gender discrimination, like women getting paid significantly less for doing the same job as their male counterparts. Now the company is in the news again because the Communications Workers of America or c w A alleges that Activision Blizzard intimidated employees in an to prevent unionization. In other words, they didn't want their employees to band together to form a union, so they set about hiring folks who would you know, prevent that from happening. As such, the labor organization has now brought a lawsuit against Activision Blizzard. According to the organizing director of the c W A Tom Smith. Quote, Activision Blizzards response to righteous worker activity was surveillance, intimidation and hiring notorious union busters end quote. So that righteous worker activity reference, Uh, that's actually two employees who were taking a stand against Activision Blizzard, protesting conditions about you know, the disparities and the sexual harassment and bringing those things into the spotlight. I should add there's an ongoing discussion within the gaming community over whether or not it's a good idea to boycott Activision Blizzard titles. You know, there are a lot of Twitch streamers who have been talking about this, and some argue that this sends a message to the company, and it's a message that's hard to ignore because if enough people are boycotting the products, that hurts the bottom line. It has to be a lot of people, and the odds of getting that many people to participate are pretty low. But if you can do it, it sends a definite message. But then you have other people saying no, game developers who are working under these awful conditions are doing so partly because they really want their work to be seen and experienced and enjoyed, and that a boycott kind of pours salt on an already you know, painful wound. So it's a complicated situation. Speaking of complicated situations, I haven't talked about Tharoness for a while, but the trial of the former CEO of that doomed company, Elizabeth Holmes, is now underway and Erica Cheung, who once worked for Tharaus, is testifying, and she actually has testified that she observed questionable processes in the company as Holmes continued to court investors to spend money on thairness, and also as she was engaging in a rather lavish and eccentric lifestyle. All right, so quick refresher on homes and thoroughness. Holmes attended Stanford University before dropping out to go on to found a biotech medical company that would evolve into Thoroughness. Now. The goal was to develop a blood scanning technology that could take a minuscule amount of blood as a sample and then run a battery of tests on it, potentially more than one hundred tests all from that tiny sample, and then print out definitive and easy to understand results based on those tests. So the ideal goal was to produce something around the size of a desktop printer that could do all of this, potentially even creating a consumer version that people could buy and have in their own homes. They could then run tests to understand whether that take in the back of their throat with something serious or not, or they could scan to see whether they might be a risk for developing some sort of serious condition down the line based upon their blood work. This was all supposed to democratize medicine, to disrupt the entire blood testing industry, and to empower patients so that they could have better, more informed conversations with their doctors. But there was a bit of a problem, and that problem was the tech was just not up to snuff, and some folks, including some people who served as advisors to Holmes while she was at Stanford, have expressed that they thought the tech might not ever work on such a small sample, that this is just asking too much from the tech and it puts too much faith on the powers of technology. That alone is somewhat understandable. I mean, I see a lot of people like putting a lot of hope in technology. But you can kind of get that because most of us carry a device in our pockets or our handbags, that is far more powerful than the most powerful personal computer from a decade ago, and we just carry it around with us wherever we go. I mean, that's that's what smartphone is. So if that became a reality, then what can't tech do. That's sort of the thought process. Chung's testimony included the revelation that Thereness staff had a six data point test that each each you know, blood test was supposed to pass in order to meet quality control standards. So, in other words, when you ran a test on the equipment, it should meet these six data points, and if it doesn't, then it's a failed test. But the staff were told to delete up to two of those six points if that would mean that the test would otherwise pass. So in other words, if you said, well, if we ignore these outliers, then everything's fine. So in other words, this could be seen as a form of cherry picking, looking for positives and then ignoring the negatives in order to boost your numbers. Chung quit her job after working for Thoroughness for six months, uh disillusioned that she was working for an organization that was, in her mind, at best unprofessional and at worst downright unethical. Chung was previously featured as a whistleblower in the book Bad Blood, which is probably the most thorough expose a on Thorodness, certainly the most famous. She was also featured on the HBO documentary The Inventor. Cross Examination of Chung began yesterday it will pick up again tomorrow on Friday. Well, I've got a couple more stories to cover, but before I do that, let's take another quick break and now we move over to the world of n f t s or non fungible tokens. These have been likened by some people, including myself, as a sort of digital receipt that shows that you quote unquote own some instance of something. Right, technically, what you own is a digital token that represents something else. That something else could be data in the form of like an illustration or a digital baseball card, or a tweet or something else. And the n f T market is built on top of blockchain technology, which means that the chain of ownership of an n f T is well established and distributed in a ledger. Uh There's so everyone who's part of the system can see when an n f T changes hands from one entity to another and verify that yes, ownership of this n f T has changed. So what can you do with n f T s. Well, you could collect them. You could try and do some speculative investing, So you could try and buy an n f T and hope that it improves in value and then sell it off for a profit. Or if you're an employee of open c that's s e A that was that's an n f T marketplace by the way, then you might engage in a little insider trading. Apparently an open Sea employee secretly purchased n f T s that the employee knew we're soon going to be featured on the front page of the open see website, and I guess the idea was that the n f T S value would increase due to the exposure of being on the front page of the website. Then the employee could sell off the n f T s at an inflated value for a tidy profit. Now, the company did not say who that employee was. A user on Twitter with the handle at zu w u t V or zooo TV accused the head of product for open c, a guy named Nate Chastain, of engaging in this behavior, but open Sea gave no real confirmation that that's the employee in question, at least not as I record this episode. However, a Chinese news platform reported that chas Stain's scheme brought in the equivalent of sixty seven thousand dollars of Ether cryptocurrency. But that's according to the current value of Ether, because cryptocurrency values tend to fluctuate, so on one day it might be you know, sixty four thousand, on another day it might be sixty eight thousands, so it can change pretty dramatically in short order. So it's kind of hard to make these kind of calls. But yeah, not great. Not great to have any sort of insider trading. It's it's not the sort of thing that you can necessarily get away with quickly, because if people are paying attention to which digital wallet these n f t s are going to, then they can start to connect the dots. Even though like on the surface level it looks like it's anonymous, if you're really paying attention to stuff, you can start to draw some conclusions, and that is what happened in this case. Now, you might remember, if you've listened to previous news episodes of tech stuff, that General Motors has had to issue a global recall on the Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicle, and the problem stems from faulty batteries, which can develop a short circuit and that leads to the battery overheating and potentially catching on fire. Now, the company has started to advise some Bolt owners that they shouldn't park their cars within fifty feet of any other vehicles, which yauza, I mean, you know, think about that in different parking situations, like parking decks or parking lots. I live in Atlanta, and if you're going anywhere in the city, it's going to be a real challenge to find a spot that's fifty feet from all other vehicles. But that illustrates how serious this issue is and how seriously Bolt owners need to take this now. To be clear, GM has given this advice in response to Bolt owners who have called into the company into like a helpline to ask what they should do when it comes to parking their vehicles. So this is not a proactive message that's going out to Bolt owners. It's more like a well, we would advise you not to park anywhere close to another car, just in case your car starts to catch on fire, like an answer to a question. Now, the recall is expected to cost GM somewhere in the neighborhood of one point eight billion dollars. As someone who is generally in favor of electric vehicles, I'm kind of sad to see the situation happen, not the recall. I'm not sad that they're recalling the faulty vehicles. That's absolutely necessary. Instead, I'm just kind of, you know, bummed that the defective batteries are there in the first place, because anything that could contribute to a reluctance to move toward an electric fleet is going to make that process more difficult. But the fact remains that we really do need to transition away from fossil fuel vehicles. Actually that that includes the entire chain, from the power production facilities like power plants, all the way down to the technology that we're relying upon day to day, like our vehicles. My last story today is a pretty cool one cern the Scientific Organization that I think might be best known in the United States either as the company that ended up or organization I should say that ended up giving birth to the Worldwide Web because of Tim berners Lee, who was working at started at the time, or more likely these days, it might be known as the organization in charge of the large Hadron Collider, the particle accelerator. Anyway, it's created a tool that's being used by the organization as well as the Institute of Global Health at the University of Geneva to use machine learning to determine what the most effective methods would be to prevent the spread of COVID nineteen in school settings. So we're seeing a lot of unfortunate and scary news about school systems being affected by COVID breakouts, and clearly students, teachers, and staff all want safe environments, but it can be difficult to know how to go about creating those environments, particularly when you've got a lot of variables involved, and you also have different levels of understanding about the behavior or the virus. Sometimes you get information that appears to contradict earlier information, so that can cause confusion. So the research with this tool has shown that a few things are most effective at really preventing the spread of COVID. Among those things are natural ventilation, so open windows are a good uh HEPPA filtration systems that's h g p A filtration systems in order to filter out contaminants in the air and face masks are all the most effective you know strategies when they're all used in combination with one another. On top of that are practices that improve it even more, like social distancing, so keeping everyone six ft apart or more, vaccinations clearly very very important, and contact tracing in the event of an actual case being detected, so that you can figure out who that person has been in close contact with. Since in most cases kids still can't get vaccinated yet, especially younger kids can't get vaccinated, these steps are really important because they can't benefit from the vaccination themselves. I mean, they can benefit from the fact that adults around them are vaccinated, but you know, the kids can't get vaccinated. Now, you might say that this all just confirms what we already thought, but that's an important part of science. Sometimes we find out that the thing we suspected to be true is true. That does happen. But there are other times where the science shows we don't have the full picture, or maybe we're asking the wrong questions. Because that's how science works and why it's not as simple as this is how it is and nothing more. Now. The reason I say all that is actually not the lecture you, because I know it comes across that way. But that's not why I say it. I say it because I need to remind myself of this very thing, because I know that I have been guilty of looking at a situation and drawing a conclusion and then acting on that conclusion without you know, actually investigating whether or not that conclusion was valid in the first place. That's not critical thinking, and I've been guilty of it. So I say this to try and hold myself more accountable. And yeah, responsibility tastes bad. Well that's the news for Thursday, Septe one. There was a ton of it, a lot of Jonathan on a soapbox. I make no apologies for it. I appreciate all you who listen all the way through, and I understand that you may not agree with my perspective. I completely respect that as long as you know you're respecting others. That's the most important part, making sure that we all do our own efforts to keep not just ourselves safe, but everyone else too, like we gotta look out for each other. Anyway, if you have suggestions for topics I should cover on future episodes of Tech Stuff, reach out to me the handle for the show. It's Tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again. Really. 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 tex Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and a lot of all things tech. And this is the Tech News for Thursday, September twenty one. And our first story is a big one. It's probably gonna take the whole first section because there's a lot to say, and then there's Jonathan's take on it as well, So let's get to it. The Wall Street Journal published an article this week revealing that their journalists got to see a report about Instagram that is concerning, to say the least, while also confirming a lot of commonly held suspicions. Now, I think most of us have at least a sense that social media can lead us to place unrealistic expectations on us in the lives we lead. A lot of people have written or talked about the tendency for folks to put forward an idealized version of themselves online, like it's not the real them, it's an idealized version of them. It makes their lives out to seem more dramatic, more exciting, and lush than they really are, and Instagram, but it's focus on pictures is particularly bad about this. A picture tells a thousand words, but you know, a lot of those words tend to be Look how awesome I am, or how awesome my house is, or how awesome this vacation spot is now. Facebook representatives, including Mark Zuckerberg himself, have frequently told the public and the United States Congress that the benefits of social media include a boost to mental health because they allow us to be part of communities and to connect with people that we care about. And that narrative might seem fairly convincing, particularly during COVID times when a lot of us have had few or possibly no opportunities to see people we used to hang out with, you know, before COVID. But the report that Wall Street saw confirmed suspicions that Instagram can have devastatingly harmful effects to mental health, particularly for teenage girls. And this report didn't come from some third party research group that you might suspect was applying confirmation bias to the investigation. By that, I mean if you have a group that has an agenda like they expect to find something bad, then they often will look for something bad, and they'll ignore anything that is contrary to that particular you know, sort of prejudice. But in this case, the investigation report came from inside Facebook itself. Researchers in the company studied the effects of Instagram on behavior and mental health and found that nearly a third of all teenage girls who are on Instagram traced serious issues with self image, confidence, and mental health to their participation with Instagram. So let's make some very rough estimates here, just again idea of how many people we could be talking about. So Instagram reportedly has around one billion users. That's billion with a B. Now, more than of those users are no older than twenty two. That's more than but let's just cut it at that gives us four million users who are twenty two or younger. Now, let's assume about half of those are women. Statistic, by the way, estimates that women make up more than it's more like fifty one. But we're doing kind of a pen on a napkin style estimation here. So that means two hundred million young women and girls are using Instagram. Now, let's say that of that number are older than teenagers. Okay, so one fifth of that number. This is just me saying this that one fifth of them are aged twenty or older. That's probably a generous estimate. It's probably fewer than that, but I'm just doing this for the purposes of illustrations. That would leave us with one sixty million teenage girls. And the report said that around thirty two of the girls that were you know, part of the study said they ended up experiencing a negative impact on their mental health that they attributed to their participation on Instagram. So that means more than if we apply this across the board and say that is representative, that would mean that more than fifty one million teenage girls could be struggling with mental health problems. They're the very least exacerbated by their time on Instagram. By the way, it gets worse. Those mental health issues can ripple into other dangerous and catastrophic consequences, everything from developing eating disorders or even leading to suicidal thoughts. Fifty one million teenage girls, and again that's a rough estimate, and I took some pretty conservative shortcuts getting there. Okay, so what's actually leading to the issues that we're seeing with mental health? One possible contributor, and again we're talking about possibilities. Here would be a tendency called social comparison, and that's exactly what sounds like. It's when you see the depiction of someone else's life and then you compare your own life to that person's life, and you come back with like a negative feeling about your own situation. So maybe it's an influencer who looks like they're in phenomenal shape. This happened to me. I'm not a teenage girl. I'm a middle aged man. But when I started on my fitness journey, which I totally have fallen off of because COVID and then a lack of resolve I'll say on my part. Anyway, when I was on that journey, I actually looked at some Instagram accounts that were about fitness, which meant that Instagram was serving up tons of different pictures of people who were insane shape. I mean Greek statues would be jealous of them, uh. And so I was inundated with images of people who were in much better shape than I was, some of which appeared to suggest that they got there in a very short amount of time. Obviously, this stuff can be rather than motivating, discouraging, right, Like if I'm seeing people who are like, yeah, you just must not be doing it right because I got to where I am in three weeks or something like that, some ludicrous explanation that can be very discouraging to me. Well, that's just one example. Or maybe the influencer is wearing designer clothing. Maybe they're hanging out in gorgeous locations. I mean, how many times have you opened Instagram and just browse stuff and saw incredibly hot people hanging out on yachts or by pools and stuff like that. In fact, I mentioned influencers. We do have an entire profession called influencer that is geared toward that kind of experience to project this pick sure of idealization, and their whole job is to influence you, to convince you that they're living out their best life and that they're being showered with amazing products and trips and stuff, and that your life could be better if it was more like their life. And then you've got the issue with people getting obsessed over numbers on Instagram, like how many followers they might have, or how many likes a post gets or how many comments of post receives. And again, if we look at influencers, we see them constantly trying to prompt engagement, often by including sort of some sort of question as a caption for a photo. So I happen to really like cool cosplay. Instagram profiles people who put in tons of work and make incredible costumes, so I get a mix of all sorts of cosplayers served up. Now, some of these cosplayers, will you know, end up posting provocative images, maybe something a bit steamy. Right. Then they'll include a caption that might say something like cheezburgers or hot dogs, which could possibly have nothing to do with the image itself, but that gets people commenting, because increased engagement is currency for influencers. Heck, I remember when some influencers were using the trick of spell out such and such in the comments letter by letter, meaning that you would post each letter in order as a separate post as a separate comment in order to prove something. I guess that was really just a trick to kind of get more comments, because if you get a high comment count as an influencer, your price tag starts to go up for brands. Right. Meanwhile, people who are comparing themselves against these sorts of influencers may start to feel really badly about themselves, like they're not popular, that something's wrong with them, and Instagram reinforces that experience again and again. Worse, Instagram has a vicious cycle built into it because so many young people use Instagram to interact with their peers. It's almost as if being on the platform is necessary just to take part in socialization with your peer group, and the experience, even when negative, can lead to compulsive use of the platform. It's like, you can't quit it because you need it. Now, I'm not just spouting off my own opinions here, although I'm doing a bit of that too. According to The Wall Street Journal, that internal report that Facebook researchers generated backs a lot of this stuff up. The researchers generated that report back in the spring of twenty twenty. But wait, it gets worse because in the spring of this year, twenty twenty one, Mark Zuckerberg said at a congressional hearing that essentially their research indicated that social platforms like Instagram have a benefit of positive effect on mental health, which is the exact opposite of what this internal report found. Now, again, it's an internal report. Facebook did not share this outside the company, so I don't think you can say that Facebook in general, like executives in general, were on a aware of it. Possibly Zuckerberg was unaware of it. I mean, maybe this is like a case with Independence Day where the president isn't told about the alien at area fifty one for the purposes of plausible deniability. Maybe that happened. I doubt it, but maybe Anyway. Congress people had already remarked on how Zuckerberg seemed evasive when answering questions, like he was trying to find ways to talk around things without actually addressing them, and that had already raised concerns even before the existence of this report was known. But this report confirms that those concerns were well narrated and to make matters even worse. Even knowing this, even knowing the potentially disastrous effect the experience of being on Instagram can have on young people, Facebook has been hard at work to develop an aversion for Instagram for kids under the age of thirteen. Now, let that settle in for a bit. You have a company knowing that its product can have harmful effects on young girls, they have a whole report about it, and they're working to make a product for even younger ones. Also, I should add that while the report focuses on young girls, those are not the only people have a negative impact from this stuff. I mean, I just mentioned that I experienced this on a certain scale, so it can affect people of all genders and ages. The teen girls appear to be, you know, as a as a population, slightly more vulnerable to this sort of influence, but that doesn't mean they they're the only ones who end up feeling lesser than after spending time on Instagram. It happens to a lot of people. So then the question comes down to what is to be done about this? Now? I suspect that without intense external pressure, not much is going to change a Facebook and Instagram. Uh. Facebook really hasn't seemed to take any massive steps towards reducing the harm it causes unless public opinion, political pressure, or most effectively and most telling lee pressure from advertisers has forced it to do so. Facebook is a heck of an example of a capitalist organization gone to the extreme, in which the primary purpose of the organization is to return value to shareholders and everything else is secondary or maybe not even a consideration. That being said, democratic lawmakers here in the United States are starting to apply that kind of pressure right now. In fact, today they've been calling on Zuckerberg to give up on this idea of an Instagram app for kids. There's also talk of another massive investigation into the company, and armed with this internal report, I think Zuckerberg is destined for another very uncomfortable hearing in front of Congress. But for most of us, I think the study shows that parents really need to be aware of these influences and to take an active role in helping their children with stuff like self esteem and confidence, and an understanding that the representations we see of people online are often a fabrication and are not reflective of reality, nor are they reflective of a person's value. We need to educate everyone that the reason most of this content that falls into this kind of harmful tendency usually is meant to ultimately serve one of a couple of different purposes that are tightly related. Now, often it's all in the effort to sell you something. Now, it might be a specific branded product, or the thing on sale might actually be the brand of the person who's sharing the content themselves, or it could be to boost a person's status, essentially saying look and how amazing my life is because I'm the best. But either way, understanding that the images that you see are not necessarily showing you what's really going on, and also that the reason that these images exist is to push out a specific branding message, all of that is helpful. I mean, I see this everywhere obviously, like this this tendency, especially in relation to Instagram. It's everywhere, like there are plenty of pop up experiences that really only exist for the purposes of people to take selfies at them and to kind of generate this image of a fun experience. But the whole experience is just about taking those selfies. Like there's nothing, there's nothing more substantive to the experience that that's all it is. It's just surface level that in itself may not, you know, be harmful on the face of it, but it contributes to this tendency I'm talking about. Also, the report found that most other social platforms don't have nearly the same negative impact as Instagram. Stuff like TikTok tends to be focused more on performance than on appearance. Stuff on Snapchat tends to feature lots of ridiculous filters, and these things don't seem to contribute as much of a negative effect on mental health. So long long coverage of that one story. But I think this one is really important. I don't think it was quite enough for me to of a full episode dedicated to it unless I get an expert in, but I really wanted to talk about it because it's it's pretty damning that Facebook had its own internal report that said these things, and yet outwardly the company has behaved as if everything it does is fine, when that is patently not the case, and they know it, and that's the worst part. All Right, We're gonna go and take a break, and when we come back, we'll have some other unrelated tech news. On Tuesday's episode this week, I mentioned that Apple was about to hold its iPhone thirteen event, but at that point it had not yet done so as I was recording the show. Obviously it's happened since then, and some of you may know all about this, But really the big surprise at the event was that some of the stuff that was rumored to be featured, like a really big update to the Apple Watch and new air pods, uh, those actually weren't part of the show. I mean, there was a new Apple Watch, but the The big changes that had been rumored uh ended up being just a slightly larger screen and a couple of new features, but nothing like the redesign that folks were expecting. Uh, you know, nothing dramatic. The new watch looks fairly close to the previous ones. It's a little bigger with the screen, and the air pods with the rumored shorter stems were a no show at the event. There are also rumors about the iPhone itself, a big one being that Apple was going to build in some sort of satellite cell phone feature so that there would be a transmitter where you could actually make a satellite phone call if you had to. Now, you wouldn't normally use the satellite system. There are issues with latency. It tends to be a really expensive kind of thing to do. But according to these rumors, you would be able to make use of this feature if you happen to be in an area that had no cell service. So that way, if you need to make an emergency phone call but you weren't close to a cell tower or a WiFi hotspot, you can do it. But that ended up not being part of the announcements either. So what we did get were new iPhones with new A fifteen bionic chips powering them. That's a proprietary chip from Apple, a new dual camera system, and the two pro models support a one hurts refresh rate for the screen. Now that means that the screen refreshes on times per second. The iPad also got a facelift. But yeah, you know, the announcements were fairly modest in nature. Honestly, I wonder if it actually benefits Apple to keep holding these big marketing events unless there happens to be something that's going to really blow people's socks off, because the company set expectations ridiculously high with big reveals, you know, a decade ago or more, and now there's a tendency for folks to say, oh, that's it, even even if the stuff that Apple is showing is an improvement over previous models, because you know, it's not like a show stopper kind of thing. But hey, I mean, it's a two trillion dollar company and the folks running it are way smarter than I am, so I'm sure I'm just not seeing the big picture. In the past, I've talked about the N s O Group a few times on this show. That's the Israeli company famous for developing a malware tool that exploits security vulnerabilities and Apple's Eye message program. And just to be clear, that's not the only company to take aim at I message and create exploits. An American company called Acuvant once upon a time did the same thing. Now use the past tense here because Acuvant subsequently found itself absorbed into a larger company called Optive, and reportedly Optive is out of the exploit development game, but Acuvant was very much in that game, using security experts to not just find vulnerabilities in various software platforms, but to develop exploits that leveraged those vulnerabilities, then selling those as products to various other entities, usually government agencies. So while I heap a lot of criticism on n s O Group, which you know, does a similar thing with the blessing and restrictions of the Israeli government, we are seeing the same sort of thing going on in other parts of the world, including here in the United States. Anyway, I bring all this up because the m I T Technology Review reports that the U. S. Department of Justice recently find three former U S intelligence and military personnel for working for the United Arab Emirates without US permission in what was called Project Raven. The operatives were using this exploit, they had purchased it from Acuvant, and then they were acting as mercenaries. They were deploying the exploit on behalf of the U A E. And reportedly the list of targets included American citizens and companies. Uh. And you know that's a big no no working on behalf of a foreign government when you're a U. S citizen without you know, the consent of the United States government. The finds amounted to a little less than one point seven million dollars. I'm assuming that's collectively, but the m I T Technology Review Report was not specific, so to be clear, the focus here is on the three and that investigation, and there's not really any investigation into optave or the former equivant. So if you take it like that, you know, you could say, oh, well, the government says it's okay if for your companies to develop tools that specifically exploit some other company's product, you know, I message from Apple in this case, it's just not okay to take that same product and then work with a foreign government. Pretty weird world we live in anyway. I Message, as the Technology Review points out, is a very popular destination for malware because Apple includes it on every iPhone, so the install base is on every single iPhone that's out there and you can't uninstall it. Anyone using an iOS device with your phone number can send you a message on I Message, and I Message automatically accepts those incoming messages, doesn't matter if you don't recognize the number or not. So if you build in what's called a zero click exploit, that's an exploit that doesn't need someone to click on a link or open up a file or anything like that, it just infects malware as long as there's a hit. Well. That means you can have one of these compromise your phone just because you receive the message on I Message. Apple has patched the vulnerabilities and I Message a couple of times, including a patch called blast Door, but hackers are always looking for other cracks in the security around the app, and it's a constant seesaw battle between developers and hackers. In addition to that, one of those three people that have been fined by the US government for this thing is Daniel Garrick, who currently serves as the Chief Information Officer or c i O of Express VPN, now the v The end company says it was aware of Garrick's previous activities before they hired him, that he was completely transparent about that, and that might sound surprising, but then the company said that his experience was what made him valuable to the company. So VPNs, or virtual private networks, are a way for people to log into one system in order to access other systems privately. Uh Effectively, it masks your activities between you and whichever end server you're trying to access. The VPN is kind of like the man in the middle in this case, and they're you know, encrypting everything so that snoopers don't know what it is you're actually doing. Anyway, Express VPN's stance was that Garrick's experiences meant he understood security vulnerabilities because he had been searching for them and then exploiting them. So this could help the company build more effective tools to protect security and privacy, because who do you want on your team other than, you know, the person who knows how to break those thingsings And that definitely makes sense from that perspective. Now, the bit about him working as a mercenary for a foreign government seems a bit much to me, but I get the concept of wanting to find someone to put on your team who has experience of familiarity with exploits. A few weeks ago, I talked about how employees at Activision Blizzard had brought forth charges relating to a toxic work culture within the company and had been part of that company for years, including charges of sexual harassment and assault, as well as a tendency for the company to protect certain employees accused of perpetrating or encouraging some truly awful behavior. There are also charges of general gender discrimination, like women getting paid significantly less for doing the same job as their male counterparts. Now the company is in the news again because the Communications Workers of America or c w A alleges that Activision Blizzard intimidated employees in an to prevent unionization. In other words, they didn't want their employees to band together to form a union, so they set about hiring folks who would you know, prevent that from happening. As such, the labor organization has now brought a lawsuit against Activision Blizzard. According to the organizing director of the c W A Tom Smith. Quote, Activision Blizzards response to righteous worker activity was surveillance, intimidation and hiring notorious union busters end quote. So that righteous worker activity reference, Uh, that's actually two employees who were taking a stand against Activision Blizzard, protesting conditions about you know, the disparities and the sexual harassment and bringing those things into the spotlight. I should add there's an ongoing discussion within the gaming community over whether or not it's a good idea to boycott Activision Blizzard titles. You know, there are a lot of Twitch streamers who have been talking about this, and some argue that this sends a message to the company, and it's a message that's hard to ignore because if enough people are boycotting the products, that hurts the bottom line. It has to be a lot of people, and the odds of getting that many people to participate are pretty low. But if you can do it, it sends a definite message. But then you have other people saying no, game developers who are working under these awful conditions are doing so partly because they really want their work to be seen and experienced and enjoyed, and that a boycott kind of pours salt on an already you know, painful wound. So it's a complicated situation. Speaking of complicated situations, I haven't talked about Tharoness for a while, but the trial of the former CEO of that doomed company, Elizabeth Holmes, is now underway and Erica Cheung, who once worked for Tharaus, is testifying, and she actually has testified that she observed questionable processes in the company as Holmes continued to court investors to spend money on thairness, and also as she was engaging in a rather lavish and eccentric lifestyle. All right, so quick refresher on homes and thoroughness. Holmes attended Stanford University before dropping out to go on to found a biotech medical company that would evolve into Thoroughness. Now. The goal was to develop a blood scanning technology that could take a minuscule amount of blood as a sample and then run a battery of tests on it, potentially more than one hundred tests all from that tiny sample, and then print out definitive and easy to understand results based on those tests. So the ideal goal was to produce something around the size of a desktop printer that could do all of this, potentially even creating a consumer version that people could buy and have in their own homes. They could then run tests to understand whether that take in the back of their throat with something serious or not, or they could scan to see whether they might be a risk for developing some sort of serious condition down the line based upon their blood work. This was all supposed to democratize medicine, to disrupt the entire blood testing industry, and to empower patients so that they could have better, more informed conversations with their doctors. But there was a bit of a problem, and that problem was the tech was just not up to snuff, and some folks, including some people who served as advisors to Holmes while she was at Stanford, have expressed that they thought the tech might not ever work on such a small sample, that this is just asking too much from the tech and it puts too much faith on the powers of technology. That alone is somewhat understandable. I mean, I see a lot of people like putting a lot of hope in technology. But you can kind of get that because most of us carry a device in our pockets or our handbags, that is far more powerful than the most powerful personal computer from a decade ago, and we just carry it around with us wherever we go. I mean, that's that's what smartphone is. So if that became a reality, then what can't tech do. That's sort of the thought process. Chung's testimony included the revelation that Thereness staff had a six data point test that each each you know, blood test was supposed to pass in order to meet quality control standards. So, in other words, when you ran a test on the equipment, it should meet these six data points, and if it doesn't, then it's a failed test. But the staff were told to delete up to two of those six points if that would mean that the test would otherwise pass. So in other words, if you said, well, if we ignore these outliers, then everything's fine. So in other words, this could be seen as a form of cherry picking, looking for positives and then ignoring the negatives in order to boost your numbers. Chung quit her job after working for Thoroughness for six months, uh disillusioned that she was working for an organization that was, in her mind, at best unprofessional and at worst downright unethical. Chung was previously featured as a whistleblower in the book Bad Blood, which is probably the most thorough expose a on Thorodness, certainly the most famous. She was also featured on the HBO documentary The Inventor. Cross Examination of Chung began yesterday it will pick up again tomorrow on Friday. Well, I've got a couple more stories to cover, but before I do that, let's take another quick break and now we move over to the world of n f t s or non fungible tokens. These have been likened by some people, including myself, as a sort of digital receipt that shows that you quote unquote own some instance of something. Right, technically, what you own is a digital token that represents something else. That something else could be data in the form of like an illustration or a digital baseball card, or a tweet or something else. And the n f T market is built on top of blockchain technology, which means that the chain of ownership of an n f T is well established and distributed in a ledger. Uh There's so everyone who's part of the system can see when an n f T changes hands from one entity to another and verify that yes, ownership of this n f T has changed. So what can you do with n f T s. Well, you could collect them. You could try and do some speculative investing, So you could try and buy an n f T and hope that it improves in value and then sell it off for a profit. Or if you're an employee of open c that's s e A that was that's an n f T marketplace by the way, then you might engage in a little insider trading. Apparently an open Sea employee secretly purchased n f T s that the employee knew we're soon going to be featured on the front page of the open see website, and I guess the idea was that the n f T S value would increase due to the exposure of being on the front page of the website. Then the employee could sell off the n f T s at an inflated value for a tidy profit. Now, the company did not say who that employee was. A user on Twitter with the handle at zu w u t V or zooo TV accused the head of product for open c, a guy named Nate Chastain, of engaging in this behavior, but open Sea gave no real confirmation that that's the employee in question, at least not as I record this episode. However, a Chinese news platform reported that chas Stain's scheme brought in the equivalent of sixty seven thousand dollars of Ether cryptocurrency. But that's according to the current value of Ether, because cryptocurrency values tend to fluctuate, so on one day it might be you know, sixty four thousand, on another day it might be sixty eight thousands, so it can change pretty dramatically in short order. So it's kind of hard to make these kind of calls. But yeah, not great. Not great to have any sort of insider trading. It's it's not the sort of thing that you can necessarily get away with quickly, because if people are paying attention to which digital wallet these n f t s are going to, then they can start to connect the dots. Even though like on the surface level it looks like it's anonymous, if you're really paying attention to stuff, you can start to draw some conclusions, and that is what happened in this case. Now, you might remember, if you've listened to previous news episodes of tech stuff, that General Motors has had to issue a global recall on the Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicle, and the problem stems from faulty batteries, which can develop a short circuit and that leads to the battery overheating and potentially catching on fire. Now, the company has started to advise some Bolt owners that they shouldn't park their cars within fifty feet of any other vehicles, which yauza, I mean, you know, think about that in different parking situations, like parking decks or parking lots. I live in Atlanta, and if you're going anywhere in the city, it's going to be a real challenge to find a spot that's fifty feet from all other vehicles. But that illustrates how serious this issue is and how seriously Bolt owners need to take this now. To be clear, GM has given this advice in response to Bolt owners who have called into the company into like a helpline to ask what they should do when it comes to parking their vehicles. So this is not a proactive message that's going out to Bolt owners. It's more like a well, we would advise you not to park anywhere close to another car, just in case your car starts to catch on fire, like an answer to a question. Now, the recall is expected to cost GM somewhere in the neighborhood of one point eight billion dollars. As someone who is generally in favor of electric vehicles, I'm kind of sad to see the situation happen, not the recall. I'm not sad that they're recalling the faulty vehicles. That's absolutely necessary. Instead, I'm just kind of, you know, bummed that the defective batteries are there in the first place, because anything that could contribute to a reluctance to move toward an electric fleet is going to make that process more difficult. But the fact remains that we really do need to transition away from fossil fuel vehicles. Actually that that includes the entire chain, from the power production facilities like power plants, all the way down to the technology that we're relying upon day to day, like our vehicles. My last story today is a pretty cool one cern the Scientific Organization that I think might be best known in the United States either as the company that ended up or organization I should say that ended up giving birth to the Worldwide Web because of Tim berners Lee, who was working at started at the time, or more likely these days, it might be known as the organization in charge of the large Hadron Collider, the particle accelerator. Anyway, it's created a tool that's being used by the organization as well as the Institute of Global Health at the University of Geneva to use machine learning to determine what the most effective methods would be to prevent the spread of COVID nineteen in school settings. So we're seeing a lot of unfortunate and scary news about school systems being affected by COVID breakouts, and clearly students, teachers, and staff all want safe environments, but it can be difficult to know how to go about creating those environments, particularly when you've got a lot of variables involved, and you also have different levels of understanding about the behavior or the virus. Sometimes you get information that appears to contradict earlier information, so that can cause confusion. So the research with this tool has shown that a few things are most effective at really preventing the spread of COVID. Among those things are natural ventilation, so open windows are a good uh HEPPA filtration systems that's h g p A filtration systems in order to filter out contaminants in the air and face masks are all the most effective you know strategies when they're all used in combination with one another. On top of that are practices that improve it even more, like social distancing, so keeping everyone six ft apart or more, vaccinations clearly very very important, and contact tracing in the event of an actual case being detected, so that you can figure out who that person has been in close contact with. Since in most cases kids still can't get vaccinated yet, especially younger kids can't get vaccinated, these steps are really important because they can't benefit from the vaccination themselves. I mean, they can benefit from the fact that adults around them are vaccinated, but you know, the kids can't get vaccinated. Now, you might say that this all just confirms what we already thought, but that's an important part of science. Sometimes we find out that the thing we suspected to be true is true. That does happen. But there are other times where the science shows we don't have the full picture, or maybe we're asking the wrong questions. Because that's how science works and why it's not as simple as this is how it is and nothing more. Now. The reason I say all that is actually not the lecture you, because I know it comes across that way. But that's not why I say it. I say it because I need to remind myself of this very thing, because I know that I have been guilty of looking at a situation and drawing a conclusion and then acting on that conclusion without you know, actually investigating whether or not that conclusion was valid in the first place. That's not critical thinking, and I've been guilty of it. So I say this to try and hold myself more accountable. And yeah, responsibility tastes bad. Well that's the news for Thursday, Septe one. There was a ton of it, a lot of Jonathan on a soapbox. I make no apologies for it. I appreciate all you who listen all the way through, and I understand that you may not agree with my perspective. I completely respect that as long as you know you're respecting others. That's the most important part, making sure that we all do our own efforts to keep not just ourselves safe, but everyone else too, like we gotta look out for each other. Anyway, if you have suggestions for topics I should cover on future episodes of Tech Stuff, reach out to me the handle for the show. It's Tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again. Really. 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.