Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and I love all things tech. This time for the tech news for Tuesday, November nine, twenty twenty one. Let's get to it. In the United States, lawmakers in the House of Representatives have introduced a bill that would require companies that use algorithms to determine what users see to offer up an alternative algorithm light version. So, in other words, a company like Meta slash Facebook would have to give people the option to opt out of the algorithm driven methodology that the company relies upon. Now, the idea behind this is that it would let users choose a path less likely to fill up their news feeds with the type of material that quote unquote drives engagement, since we've seen time and time again that a lot of bad actors have taken advantage of that approach to spread misinformation and hate speech and other awful stuff. This comes on the heels of the Francis Hogan hearings, in which the former Facebook employee shared her observations about the company's practices and She asserted that these practices are harmful on a really broad scale, not just two people individually, but potentially to big stuff like the concept of democracy itself. The bill is worded in a way that says companies would need to create an quote input transparent algorithm end quote, meaning that the platform wouldn't use any user data to determine what that user sees, so theoretically get a more generic experien oriants in that regard. One way this might manifest is a true reverse chronological order of posts. That is, you would see the most recent posts at the top of your feed, and then you would work down to progressively older posts, you know, the way a lot of folks preferred Facebook before the company made that choice harder and harder to find and ultimately watered it down with an algorithmic approach. If this bill becomes law, it could have a massive impact on Facebook's business. The company depends heavily on promoting material that gets a lot of engagement because that keeps people on the platform longer. That therefore Facebook has more time to sell more ads, essentially to display more ads to users, and thus they make way more money through advertising. Any regulations that would impact that could potentially lead to people spending less time on the platform, and then Facebook would make money, which I assure you the company is not super keen on doing so. If this bill does pass, I can almost guarantee that, unless it is otherwise mandated by the law, Facebook will make sure that this option to switch to the transparent algorithm approach will be buried deep in options so that the average person isn't likely to go looking for it anyway. I think this is an interesting approach, and one I happen to think is is a pretty decent idea, at least on the surface. I also imagine it won't stop Facebook's critics from advocating for the company to get broken up. That is a conversation I suspect will continue. The US Federal Trade Commission, or FTC will soon send around sixty million dollars to more than a hundred forty thousand drivers for Amazon. So why is that happening? Well, this is because Amazon US illegally withholding tips that the drivers had earned from customers between to twenty nineteen. The FTC sued Amazon earlier this year over the matter, saying that the company was regularly holding back tips that customers had opted to give drivers through you know apps and web based services. Further, the FTC said that Amazon only stopped doing this once they became aware that the FTC was investigating them. Amazon ultimately settled this case out of court and agreed to return all the money it had stolen from drivers, and they would also stop obfuse skating how much the drivers were making. Also, the company can't change how tips are factored into driver compensation without first acquiring drivers informed consent on the matter due to terms of the settlement. According to the FTC, the largest payout to an individual driver and I can't believe this, it's an excess of twenty eight thousand dollars. Now, the average payout is closer to four d twenty two dollars. But let's go back to that twenty eight large for a second. Imagine, just for a moment, that you found out your employer had effectively stolen twenty eight thousand dollars from you, that you had earned that money, but your employer took it for themselves. That is beyond unacceptable. I mean it's absolutely crazy. Right Anyway, drivers who received checks and that would be one nine thousand, five hundred seven of the drivers, they should deposit or cash those checks before January seven, twenty two. The remaining drivers are actually receiving their payouts the paypals, so they don't have to worry about that. If a driver receives more than six hundred dollars, they will also receive than I R S. Form ten to fill out because they have to declare that on taxes, but that should actually affect fewer than twenty thousand of the more than one drivers. Anyway, I am glad to hear that the drivers will finally be getting the money they earned, and glad that for once we're seeing a big company held accountable for screwing over the workers that that company employs. Speaking of companies that are being held accountable, it's time to talk about Tesla again. So you might remember that last month the company rolled out an update to Tesla owners who are participating in the beta program for the so called full self driving feature. And once again I remind you that full self driving is in fact a misleading phrase because it is not actually a fully autonomous mode. Anyway, that rollout ended up causing dangerous problems as Tesla vehicles were autonomously miss and mistakenly interpreting a potential frontal collision even if there were no cars or any other obstacles in front of the vehicles. They were saying, WHOA, We're about to collide with something and there was nothing there. That then prompted the cars to engage the brakes to avoid this so called collision, and it made the Tesla's practically undrivable. Owners reported this issue. Some people even took videos of what it was like trying to drive the car with this mode enabled, and they showed how the car would spontaneously detect a potential collision in perfectly safe conditions and then slam on the brakes, and obviously that act would then constitute an actual dangerous situation, potentially leading to rear end collisions if someone were following that Tesla and they were going at a good clip. The company hastily rolled back this update, and Elon Musk tweeted out the equivalent of Hey, these things happen. It's software had it's a beta program and essentially brushed it off, but Tesla. The company subsequently filed a recall notice with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration or the n h t s A a government authority that obviously oversees stuff like safety issues with highways and roads. So why did Tesla actually issue the recall if they had already rolled back the update. Well, that was because the nh T s A has been taking a more aggressive approach in investigating and regulating self driving vehicles recently, and Tesla has been the subject of some scrutiny. The n h T s A had already reprimanded Tesla, saying that the company has to actually follow protocol. It has to operate within the boundaries of laws and regulations for vehicles instead of just playing more fast and loose like a typical Silicon Valley company. If a software company rolls back a patch, that might be frustrating, right if a patch ens up making things worse for your software and then they roll it back. But for car companies this is really a matter of safety. I mean, if my copy of Diablo gets rolled back, I might lose some data, but with cars, we're talking about life or death kind of stuff. Anyway, Tesla, the company has started to change its ways conforming to these requirements, but not without Elon complaining about it and sicking rabid Tesla fans On regulators. Classy guy that Elon Musk also classy folks, those rabid Tesla fans cheese. I suspect this isn't going to convince the government to adopt a more lenient approach to Tesla, because Elon Musk is really good at rilling people and organizations and governments up. And while we're talking about Musk, let's also mention his ongoing complaints about, you know, having to pay taxes like a common person. You know, it's that thing that billionaires really hate to do. There's been an increased push to in increased taxes to billionaires. Those are the people who can obviously afford to pay taxes the most, but are also the least inclined to do so. And Musk is no exception to the rule that these ultra rich folks really just don't want to part way is with even a fraction of their billions. Anyway, Musk tweeted out a pole recently, and he wrote, quote much is made lately of unrealized gains being a means of tax avoidance. So I propose selling of my test less stock. Do you support this? End quote? Nearly fifty of the respondents said yes. Nowhere yet on if Elon Musk has followed through with this. He said he would, but at least when I have gone to record, that had not yet been reported. However, if he did sell that off, based upon the closing price for Testlas stock on Friday, it would have meant he would have been selling around twenty one billion with a b dollars worth of stock. Yawza. Also, the whole thing appeared to affect Tesla's stock value because the price of Tesla's stock declined by five percent. And I think this is yet another example of Elon Musk's messaging having a potentially massive impact on the market. We've seen it before, where he tweets something and then we see a massive move in the market. I think that says a lot about Musk's influence. It also says a lot about his lack of concern about how much influence he has, and it probably it's a pretty decent argument about you know why, the stock market is sometimes just a big old dumb psychological experiment. Now, granted, over time, the market typically will correct itself as long as there is enough time for it to do so, and there's a lack of interference, but really this does nail home that we humans are emotional and often irrational creatures that can do a lot of harm without a lot of effort. The Washington Post most reports that the Israeli military has been employing facial recognition technology in a widespread surveillance campaign targeting Palestinians in the West Bank region. It's part of an initiative called Blue Wolf, and according to the Post, it involves the Israeli military taking photos of Palestinians and those photos go into a large database of images, and the Blue Wolf system looks for matches in its database and then sends a signal to the soldiers phone, and the phone will flash a color to the soldier indicating whether the person in the image should be left alone or if the soldiers should detain that person or even arrest them. Apparently, the military created incentives for soldiers to participate in this program, getting them to take thousands of photos of Palestinians in the process. There were even competitions for soldiers where they could win prizes if they took the most photos within a given amount of time. The system also interconnects with closed circuit UH security cameras. Those are found throughout the West Bank region. There in, in fact, are some of these cameras that aim at or into homes of Palestinians, So to call this invasive would be understating things to the extreme. And the fact that there were incentives for soldiers to be active participants in this really makes me think of the awful stop and frisk policy that we used to see in New York City not that long ago, in which police officers effectively had quotas they were expected to meet when it came to just stopping random citizens and frisking them, which led to disproportionate targeting of non white citizens. And as always, we have to remember that facial recognition technology is far from perfect. So even if you roll it out in a way that isn't you know, authoritarian and scary, the technology still makes mistakes and when it comes to stuff like deciding if someone should be detained or arrested, that really becomes a dystopian nightmare. After that one, I think we all could use a little bit of a break, So we will be back after these short messages. We're back. So the brokerage company robin Hood, which is known primarily as a fee free company that allows the average person to invest in you know. The stock market has recently announced that hackers had breached corporate systems and gained access to the personal information of around five million customers. Uh most of them, it was just their email addresses. However, the hackers were also able to see the full names of around two million robin Hood customers and apparently for a lucky three d robin Hood customers. The hackers also saw more personal information like there's zip code and their birth date and other stuff. Now, robin Hood says that the more sensitive information stuff like social security numbers or bank account numbers or debit card numbers, those were not part of this breach, so it definitely could have been a lot worse. And apparently the hackers were able to gain access through the tried and true method of social engineering, which essentially is a fancy way of saying they tricked someone into letting them in. So in this case, it seems like they fooled a customer support representative at robin Hood to grant them access to the system. The classic way of doing this, by the way, is that you pose as I T and that you need access to a system in order to install an update or otherwise do some sort of maintenance, and you trick someone into giving you that level of access. You know, obviously from a hacker standpoint, what you're aiming for is administrator level access. But sometimes, you know, you just take what you can get. That seems to be the case with robin Hood in this instant. So that's a classic way of getting access to a system. It doesn't require you to set it a keyboard and just randomly guess at passwords, which is that's how we typically see it in like Hollywood productions, you don't often see the social engineering side. Some shows and movies do that, but most of the time it's the whole No, it's not that no, it's not that oh, hey, you got it, which I mean, if it were that easy, then nothing would be safe. It's not that easy. By the way. You might also remember robin Hood as the company that was heavily criticized when individual investors wanted to invest in game Stop stock as part of a hedge fund squeeze campaign, and then they found that robin Hood, the supposed brokerage for the people, had put the brakes on that activity, saying that they didn't want to encourage market volatility and such, whereas the critics were saying that Robin Hood had corporate ties with individuals who had a financial stake in game Stop stock going down. If you don't remember that story, game Stop stock had been trading it around twenty dollars a share for a long time, and then uh, after months of enthusiasm, we saw more investors individual investors start to buy up game Stop stock, which drove the price up. At last I looked at with some trading it somewhere around two nineteen dollars, so, you know, ten times as valuable as it was a couple of years ago. Pretty incredible. But the whole reason for that, or at least one of the reasons for that, was that there were these hedge funds that had recommended short selling the stock, which hinges on a stock price going down. With the stock price going up, it ended up putting the squeeze on these hedge funds. Anyway, just another fun story in the in the history of Robin Hood. In other hacker news, a group called fail overflow announced it had uncovered the root keys for PS five encryption, that is, the Sony PlayStation five. Now what does that actually mean. Well, let's suss this out, so consoles when you boil them down, video game consoles are just specialized computers. Not that I recommend you boil a video game console or any other computer for that matter, because that will definitely violate your warranty. But computers run software, right However, video game consoles typically have protections in place, so you can't just run any software you like on them. You can only run the stuff that the company allows you to run on them, so you can run specific software like games. So it's a gated community in other words, and the company behind the video game console controls gate access, but the encryption keys, the root keys, are essentially a way to fool the gate into thinking you're the authorized identity that can come and go as you please. That means you could potentially run other types of software on this console once you unlock it. Now to me, it sounds like the fail overflow group is really your classic hacker group. These are people who wonder how systems actually work, and then they figure it out, and then they learn how they can exploit those systems. You know, but by exploit, I really mean they just use it in a way that was not the way the creators intended. So running home brew software and a console doesn't have to involve stuff like pirating games, for example, And in fact, fail overflow has made statements that make me think that the hacker group really doesn't want to encourage piracy at all, just the opposite. In fact, however, the group also acknowledges that the majority of people who would actually use root keys would likely be doing so in order to pirate games. Perhaps for that reason, the group is not publishing the root keys. Oh so they have participated in the past and finding bugs in Sony platforms and and earning money that way, because a lot of companies will pay out essentially a bug bounty. In this case, I think it's a reminder that security systems are not perfect and they're not infallible. And this would be an argument that Sony had put in a maybe not a weak encryption scheme, but not the strongest that they could. Like, if it is something that is breakable, that's not great. It shows a weakness, and that's not necessarily meant to exploit that weakness, but rather perhaps an indication to the company, Hey, the way you did this was not very good. You need to do better. Ransomware attacks have been on the rise for the last couple of years, and the hacker group REvil is one of several that have been in the news lately. The U s Department of Justice recently announced that it had arrested someone alleged to be part of the Revill gang. This would be a Ukrainian man named Yaroslav Vazynski. Polish authorities detained Vezynski in October because US authorities had issued an indictment against Vizynski way back in August, and Vazynski now faces extradition hearings which could see him transferred to the United States to stand for trial for cyber crimes. In addition, the d o J announced that it had seized more than six million dollars in assets believed to be linked to Revil's ransomware activities. Now, this money did not come from Vezynski's accounts. Instead, they came from a Russian named Yavigny paulian In. And I know I've butchered the name. You don't have to let me know. I apologize, But it was a different member of REvil, or alleged member I should say of REvil. And he was also indicted in August. He remains at large, so he has not been taken into custody. Zynski is the third of Revil's alleged members to be arrested. They could potentially face a prison sentence of up to one hundred years if they were convicted on all counts against them, And I think this is really a campaign that's a message to ransomware gangs that if they are caught, they face a price that's much higher than what they can extort through ransomware attacks. But whether that acts as an actual deterrent remains to be seen. Recently, the House of Representatives passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which most folks have heard of as the one point to trillion dollar infrastructure bill here in the United States. Now that there is a ton of stuff in that bill, and we're going to talk about a couple of tech related pieces. One of those is a sixty five billion dollar package to increase broadband internet access in the US. Most of that would go to subsidies to internet service providers that commit to building out broadband infrastructure into underserved areas. Some of the money will also go to subsidy programs that will help individual households so that they can afford broadband access plans and thus offset the cost that they would otherwise have to pay. These measures are a good step, but they represent a massive cut to what was originally in the bill. The original version of the bill set aside one hundred billion dollars to improve broadband access, so almost half of that got taken out by the time it finally was passed. Still, a little improvement is better than the status quo by definition, but it now falls to the various I s p s and the f c C to make sure that this plan actually leads to action and increased access once President Biden actually signs it into law. Of that is, so while the law is a good step in the right direction, it's not as big at step is what people were hoping for. And of course the activation is really what matters. Right. If these companies end up taking subsidies and then really drag their feet on actually building out the infrastructure, it doesn't really do anyone any good. And we have seen that kind of stuff happened in the past. Uh, hopefully that's not how it's gonna turn out this time. But um, you know, it's too early to say. We have a couple more stories that we're going to cover. But before we get to that, let's take another quick break. So I mentioned that there were a couple of pieces in that Infrastructure bill that related to tech. Well, another element is one that actually concerns me quite a bit, and I've talked about it in a previous tech Stuff tech News episode. So wrapped up in that Infrastructure bill is a mandate that car manufacturers will have to incorporate technology that can passively monitor drivers and identify whether or not the driver is operating a vehicle while impaired, and then go on to limit or prevent vehicle operation if the vehicle says, yeah, this person is kind of messed up. Now, let me be clear, if the technology we used to do this were amazingly accurate, and the implementation in systems that would limit motor vehicle operation were proven to be both effective and safe, I would be all for this. I don't want intoxicated or otherwise impaired drivers to operate vehicles, potentially putting themselves and others in severe danger. I don't want that to happen. I think driving well intoxicated is Honestly, I think of it as an unforgivable act because I think it shows a flagrant disregard for human life and safety, and it's so alien to me that I absolutely condemn it. However, my big problem is that the tech we have today isn't totally reliable. Now, car companies will have to start implementing this by around so it still gives us some time. But you also have to remember that incorporating this takes years, right, you have to you know, the whole process of developing a car can be a two year process, so it's really not that far out when you start thinking, oh, we have to incorporate this within the that really means that car companies have to actively start working on implementation by four And the fact that the tech is not fully reliable is a potentially enormous problem. Like you could have a car mistakenly identify someone as being intoxicated, and then that person would suddenly find that they can't drive their car. That would be a problem, right, even if they aren't actually inhibited in any other way, they wouldn't be able to use their car because the car had mistakenly identified them as being intoxicated. That's bad. But if the system fails to detect that someone is intoxicated when they actually are that's like having no system in there at all. Like, it's essentially the same as if you didn't have a system. So if it doesn't have a high enough level of accuracy and detecting it, you might as well not even have it. On top of that, we've seen with Tesla's autopilot and it's full self driving systems that features that are meant to take over for a human driver can sometimes be dangerous themselves. Now, I'm not saying that these systems are more dangerous than an inebriated driver, right that would be ridiculous for me to suggest. However, they haven't been proven to actually be safe. And so if you say let's replace this one definitively very unsafe act with another that has yet to be proven to be safe, that doesn't seem like it's a good move to me. I feel like this is an example of people who are relying upon technology to solve a problem that the tech just isn't up to solving yet. And again, I do get that this is a very real problem that we need a solution. We need to address the problem of drivers who drive under the influence, because they stand to be an enormous danger to others, and it's awful that there's not some you know, easy way to do this that does and involves severely restricting someone's freedom. I'm just worried that technology, at least as it is right now, is not the right solution, because you know, it's it's it's not it's not able to do what we are depending upon it to do. And if we dust off our hands and say, all right, we sorted that out, now, let's go on to the next problem, what we're really doing is just setting ourselves up for tragedy in the future when the tech falls short and people are still being people. That is, we still have some people who get inebriated and then insist on driving, and I you know, I'll also point out that there will be people who argue that this sort of thing kind of infringes on freedoms and whatnot. For the record, that's not my objection. I don't I'm not one of those people who says this tech is infringing upon my freedom because I don't believe in freedom extending to the point where you can put other people in danger. My argument is more along the lines of if I drink poison, getting someone to put a band aid on my finger is not solving the problem, right, It's not addressing the actual thing. The solution is not really a solution. And that's what I worry about when it comes to tech as a way of preventing drunk driving. I just I am not convinced that it actually is doing anything helpful. Now. Hopefully, by the time car companies have to, you know, work within this mandate because it is law now, maybe that will all be sorted out, and hopefully it means that we'll see a drastic reduction of injuries and deaths due to drivers who would otherwise be operating a vehicle while under the influence of alcohol or other intoxicating effects. I just I worry that it's not gonna be a real solution. All Right, I'm done. I know I wind on about that for way too long, but it's something that I recognize in a lot of places where people, you know, see a problem and they just say tech will sort that out, and they walk away without really without really coming up with an effective approach. The same thing, by the way, happens with climate change. I know tons of people who said we'll engineer our way out of climate change without actually proposing any actionable engineering approaches to dealing with climate change, which is the same thing as saying that's a future Jonathan problem. It never works out well for future Jonathan. Future Jonathan invariably hates present day Jonathan and really hates past Jonathan. I can say that with certainty. All Right, A while back, in fact, quite a bit ways back, I did a series of episodes about the company General Electric a k A. G E. In fact, I plan on running those episodes next week because I'm gonna be on vacation next week, so we're gonna rerun the g E episodes. But I've got an update to the GE story, and that's the company recently announced it is going to split into three separate companies over the near future. One is going to focus on energy, one company will focus on the healthcare industry, and the third company will focus on aviation. Now, this split again, it's not happening immediately. It's not like, you know, they just did a reverse Vultron. Instead, GE announced that it will spin off the healthcare organization sometime in the beginning of three and then the energy division will spin off sometime in early The idea is that each individual company will be more focused with its own specific leadership in order to direct company efforts to excel in those specific industries without having to worry about the other division. Current ge CEO Lawrence Culp said he will lead the Aviation division and that's the one that is going to hold on to the g E name. And finally, Nintendo has given video game console fans something to look forward to. The company announced in an earning skull the plans to release a brand new video game console. So the Switch, which is Nintendo's most recent console, launched in ten and Nintendo gave the Switch a little bit of a glow up earlier this year, releasing an O led screen version that had some modest tweaks, uh, the biggest one being a larger, brighter screen that was an old screen, but not nothing revolutionary like it was a It was an incremental step, not a not like a full premium upgrade. But they're also had not been any word of a successor to the Nintendo Switch, So this is really big news. When can you expect the as yet unnamed Nintendo console, Well, it will happen sometime between today and December thirty one, two thousand YEP. According to the slide deck in the earnings call, we should expect a new console sometime in the year two zero x x, so that means sometime in the next seventy two years or so we should get a new Nintendo console. Now, sure you could argue that's not really news at all, because surely Nintendo would release something between now and the end of the century. But to you, I say, come on, get off my back. I wanted something silly to end this episode with, and this one one out all right. That is the tech news for Tuesday, November nine, twenty one. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of Tech Stuff, reach out to me. The best way to do that is with Twitter. Use the Twitter handled text stuff H s W and that'll get in touch with me. Also, as a reminder, I am on vacation. Next week we will be rerunning the g E Story episodes and on Thursday, I believe we will have of next week we will have a Smart Talks with IBM episode and then I'll be back the following week and we will be back to business as usual. And until all that time, I'll talk to you again, really Sion like tomorrow text Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and I love all things tech. This time for the tech news for Tuesday, November nine, twenty twenty one. Let's get to it. In the United States, lawmakers in the House of Representatives have introduced a bill that would require companies that use algorithms to determine what users see to offer up an alternative algorithm light version. So, in other words, a company like Meta slash Facebook would have to give people the option to opt out of the algorithm driven methodology that the company relies upon. Now, the idea behind this is that it would let users choose a path less likely to fill up their news feeds with the type of material that quote unquote drives engagement, since we've seen time and time again that a lot of bad actors have taken advantage of that approach to spread misinformation and hate speech and other awful stuff. This comes on the heels of the Francis Hogan hearings, in which the former Facebook employee shared her observations about the company's practices and She asserted that these practices are harmful on a really broad scale, not just two people individually, but potentially to big stuff like the concept of democracy itself. The bill is worded in a way that says companies would need to create an quote input transparent algorithm end quote, meaning that the platform wouldn't use any user data to determine what that user sees, so theoretically get a more generic experien oriants in that regard. One way this might manifest is a true reverse chronological order of posts. That is, you would see the most recent posts at the top of your feed, and then you would work down to progressively older posts, you know, the way a lot of folks preferred Facebook before the company made that choice harder and harder to find and ultimately watered it down with an algorithmic approach. If this bill becomes law, it could have a massive impact on Facebook's business. The company depends heavily on promoting material that gets a lot of engagement because that keeps people on the platform longer. That therefore Facebook has more time to sell more ads, essentially to display more ads to users, and thus they make way more money through advertising. Any regulations that would impact that could potentially lead to people spending less time on the platform, and then Facebook would make money, which I assure you the company is not super keen on doing so. If this bill does pass, I can almost guarantee that, unless it is otherwise mandated by the law, Facebook will make sure that this option to switch to the transparent algorithm approach will be buried deep in options so that the average person isn't likely to go looking for it anyway. I think this is an interesting approach, and one I happen to think is is a pretty decent idea, at least on the surface. I also imagine it won't stop Facebook's critics from advocating for the company to get broken up. That is a conversation I suspect will continue. The US Federal Trade Commission, or FTC will soon send around sixty million dollars to more than a hundred forty thousand drivers for Amazon. So why is that happening? Well, this is because Amazon US illegally withholding tips that the drivers had earned from customers between to twenty nineteen. The FTC sued Amazon earlier this year over the matter, saying that the company was regularly holding back tips that customers had opted to give drivers through you know apps and web based services. Further, the FTC said that Amazon only stopped doing this once they became aware that the FTC was investigating them. Amazon ultimately settled this case out of court and agreed to return all the money it had stolen from drivers, and they would also stop obfuse skating how much the drivers were making. Also, the company can't change how tips are factored into driver compensation without first acquiring drivers informed consent on the matter due to terms of the settlement. According to the FTC, the largest payout to an individual driver and I can't believe this, it's an excess of twenty eight thousand dollars. Now, the average payout is closer to four d twenty two dollars. But let's go back to that twenty eight large for a second. Imagine, just for a moment, that you found out your employer had effectively stolen twenty eight thousand dollars from you, that you had earned that money, but your employer took it for themselves. That is beyond unacceptable. I mean it's absolutely crazy. Right Anyway, drivers who received checks and that would be one nine thousand, five hundred seven of the drivers, they should deposit or cash those checks before January seven, twenty two. The remaining drivers are actually receiving their payouts the paypals, so they don't have to worry about that. If a driver receives more than six hundred dollars, they will also receive than I R S. Form ten to fill out because they have to declare that on taxes, but that should actually affect fewer than twenty thousand of the more than one drivers. Anyway, I am glad to hear that the drivers will finally be getting the money they earned, and glad that for once we're seeing a big company held accountable for screwing over the workers that that company employs. Speaking of companies that are being held accountable, it's time to talk about Tesla again. So you might remember that last month the company rolled out an update to Tesla owners who are participating in the beta program for the so called full self driving feature. And once again I remind you that full self driving is in fact a misleading phrase because it is not actually a fully autonomous mode. Anyway, that rollout ended up causing dangerous problems as Tesla vehicles were autonomously miss and mistakenly interpreting a potential frontal collision even if there were no cars or any other obstacles in front of the vehicles. They were saying, WHOA, We're about to collide with something and there was nothing there. That then prompted the cars to engage the brakes to avoid this so called collision, and it made the Tesla's practically undrivable. Owners reported this issue. Some people even took videos of what it was like trying to drive the car with this mode enabled, and they showed how the car would spontaneously detect a potential collision in perfectly safe conditions and then slam on the brakes, and obviously that act would then constitute an actual dangerous situation, potentially leading to rear end collisions if someone were following that Tesla and they were going at a good clip. The company hastily rolled back this update, and Elon Musk tweeted out the equivalent of Hey, these things happen. It's software had it's a beta program and essentially brushed it off, but Tesla. The company subsequently filed a recall notice with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration or the n h t s A a government authority that obviously oversees stuff like safety issues with highways and roads. So why did Tesla actually issue the recall if they had already rolled back the update. Well, that was because the nh T s A has been taking a more aggressive approach in investigating and regulating self driving vehicles recently, and Tesla has been the subject of some scrutiny. The n h T s A had already reprimanded Tesla, saying that the company has to actually follow protocol. It has to operate within the boundaries of laws and regulations for vehicles instead of just playing more fast and loose like a typical Silicon Valley company. If a software company rolls back a patch, that might be frustrating, right if a patch ens up making things worse for your software and then they roll it back. But for car companies this is really a matter of safety. I mean, if my copy of Diablo gets rolled back, I might lose some data, but with cars, we're talking about life or death kind of stuff. Anyway, Tesla, the company has started to change its ways conforming to these requirements, but not without Elon complaining about it and sicking rabid Tesla fans On regulators. Classy guy that Elon Musk also classy folks, those rabid Tesla fans cheese. I suspect this isn't going to convince the government to adopt a more lenient approach to Tesla, because Elon Musk is really good at rilling people and organizations and governments up. And while we're talking about Musk, let's also mention his ongoing complaints about, you know, having to pay taxes like a common person. You know, it's that thing that billionaires really hate to do. There's been an increased push to in increased taxes to billionaires. Those are the people who can obviously afford to pay taxes the most, but are also the least inclined to do so. And Musk is no exception to the rule that these ultra rich folks really just don't want to part way is with even a fraction of their billions. Anyway, Musk tweeted out a pole recently, and he wrote, quote much is made lately of unrealized gains being a means of tax avoidance. So I propose selling of my test less stock. Do you support this? End quote? Nearly fifty of the respondents said yes. Nowhere yet on if Elon Musk has followed through with this. He said he would, but at least when I have gone to record, that had not yet been reported. However, if he did sell that off, based upon the closing price for Testlas stock on Friday, it would have meant he would have been selling around twenty one billion with a b dollars worth of stock. Yawza. Also, the whole thing appeared to affect Tesla's stock value because the price of Tesla's stock declined by five percent. And I think this is yet another example of Elon Musk's messaging having a potentially massive impact on the market. We've seen it before, where he tweets something and then we see a massive move in the market. I think that says a lot about Musk's influence. It also says a lot about his lack of concern about how much influence he has, and it probably it's a pretty decent argument about you know why, the stock market is sometimes just a big old dumb psychological experiment. Now, granted, over time, the market typically will correct itself as long as there is enough time for it to do so, and there's a lack of interference, but really this does nail home that we humans are emotional and often irrational creatures that can do a lot of harm without a lot of effort. The Washington Post most reports that the Israeli military has been employing facial recognition technology in a widespread surveillance campaign targeting Palestinians in the West Bank region. It's part of an initiative called Blue Wolf, and according to the Post, it involves the Israeli military taking photos of Palestinians and those photos go into a large database of images, and the Blue Wolf system looks for matches in its database and then sends a signal to the soldiers phone, and the phone will flash a color to the soldier indicating whether the person in the image should be left alone or if the soldiers should detain that person or even arrest them. Apparently, the military created incentives for soldiers to participate in this program, getting them to take thousands of photos of Palestinians in the process. There were even competitions for soldiers where they could win prizes if they took the most photos within a given amount of time. The system also interconnects with closed circuit UH security cameras. Those are found throughout the West Bank region. There in, in fact, are some of these cameras that aim at or into homes of Palestinians, So to call this invasive would be understating things to the extreme. And the fact that there were incentives for soldiers to be active participants in this really makes me think of the awful stop and frisk policy that we used to see in New York City not that long ago, in which police officers effectively had quotas they were expected to meet when it came to just stopping random citizens and frisking them, which led to disproportionate targeting of non white citizens. And as always, we have to remember that facial recognition technology is far from perfect. So even if you roll it out in a way that isn't you know, authoritarian and scary, the technology still makes mistakes and when it comes to stuff like deciding if someone should be detained or arrested, that really becomes a dystopian nightmare. After that one, I think we all could use a little bit of a break, So we will be back after these short messages. We're back. So the brokerage company robin Hood, which is known primarily as a fee free company that allows the average person to invest in you know. The stock market has recently announced that hackers had breached corporate systems and gained access to the personal information of around five million customers. Uh most of them, it was just their email addresses. However, the hackers were also able to see the full names of around two million robin Hood customers and apparently for a lucky three d robin Hood customers. The hackers also saw more personal information like there's zip code and their birth date and other stuff. Now, robin Hood says that the more sensitive information stuff like social security numbers or bank account numbers or debit card numbers, those were not part of this breach, so it definitely could have been a lot worse. And apparently the hackers were able to gain access through the tried and true method of social engineering, which essentially is a fancy way of saying they tricked someone into letting them in. So in this case, it seems like they fooled a customer support representative at robin Hood to grant them access to the system. The classic way of doing this, by the way, is that you pose as I T and that you need access to a system in order to install an update or otherwise do some sort of maintenance, and you trick someone into giving you that level of access. You know, obviously from a hacker standpoint, what you're aiming for is administrator level access. But sometimes, you know, you just take what you can get. That seems to be the case with robin Hood in this instant. So that's a classic way of getting access to a system. It doesn't require you to set it a keyboard and just randomly guess at passwords, which is that's how we typically see it in like Hollywood productions, you don't often see the social engineering side. Some shows and movies do that, but most of the time it's the whole No, it's not that no, it's not that oh, hey, you got it, which I mean, if it were that easy, then nothing would be safe. It's not that easy. By the way. You might also remember robin Hood as the company that was heavily criticized when individual investors wanted to invest in game Stop stock as part of a hedge fund squeeze campaign, and then they found that robin Hood, the supposed brokerage for the people, had put the brakes on that activity, saying that they didn't want to encourage market volatility and such, whereas the critics were saying that Robin Hood had corporate ties with individuals who had a financial stake in game Stop stock going down. If you don't remember that story, game Stop stock had been trading it around twenty dollars a share for a long time, and then uh, after months of enthusiasm, we saw more investors individual investors start to buy up game Stop stock, which drove the price up. At last I looked at with some trading it somewhere around two nineteen dollars, so, you know, ten times as valuable as it was a couple of years ago. Pretty incredible. But the whole reason for that, or at least one of the reasons for that, was that there were these hedge funds that had recommended short selling the stock, which hinges on a stock price going down. With the stock price going up, it ended up putting the squeeze on these hedge funds. Anyway, just another fun story in the in the history of Robin Hood. In other hacker news, a group called fail overflow announced it had uncovered the root keys for PS five encryption, that is, the Sony PlayStation five. Now what does that actually mean. Well, let's suss this out, so consoles when you boil them down, video game consoles are just specialized computers. Not that I recommend you boil a video game console or any other computer for that matter, because that will definitely violate your warranty. But computers run software, right However, video game consoles typically have protections in place, so you can't just run any software you like on them. You can only run the stuff that the company allows you to run on them, so you can run specific software like games. So it's a gated community in other words, and the company behind the video game console controls gate access, but the encryption keys, the root keys, are essentially a way to fool the gate into thinking you're the authorized identity that can come and go as you please. That means you could potentially run other types of software on this console once you unlock it. Now to me, it sounds like the fail overflow group is really your classic hacker group. These are people who wonder how systems actually work, and then they figure it out, and then they learn how they can exploit those systems. You know, but by exploit, I really mean they just use it in a way that was not the way the creators intended. So running home brew software and a console doesn't have to involve stuff like pirating games, for example, And in fact, fail overflow has made statements that make me think that the hacker group really doesn't want to encourage piracy at all, just the opposite. In fact, however, the group also acknowledges that the majority of people who would actually use root keys would likely be doing so in order to pirate games. Perhaps for that reason, the group is not publishing the root keys. Oh so they have participated in the past and finding bugs in Sony platforms and and earning money that way, because a lot of companies will pay out essentially a bug bounty. In this case, I think it's a reminder that security systems are not perfect and they're not infallible. And this would be an argument that Sony had put in a maybe not a weak encryption scheme, but not the strongest that they could. Like, if it is something that is breakable, that's not great. It shows a weakness, and that's not necessarily meant to exploit that weakness, but rather perhaps an indication to the company, Hey, the way you did this was not very good. You need to do better. Ransomware attacks have been on the rise for the last couple of years, and the hacker group REvil is one of several that have been in the news lately. The U s Department of Justice recently announced that it had arrested someone alleged to be part of the Revill gang. This would be a Ukrainian man named Yaroslav Vazynski. Polish authorities detained Vezynski in October because US authorities had issued an indictment against Vizynski way back in August, and Vazynski now faces extradition hearings which could see him transferred to the United States to stand for trial for cyber crimes. In addition, the d o J announced that it had seized more than six million dollars in assets believed to be linked to Revil's ransomware activities. Now, this money did not come from Vezynski's accounts. Instead, they came from a Russian named Yavigny paulian In. And I know I've butchered the name. You don't have to let me know. I apologize, But it was a different member of REvil, or alleged member I should say of REvil. And he was also indicted in August. He remains at large, so he has not been taken into custody. Zynski is the third of Revil's alleged members to be arrested. They could potentially face a prison sentence of up to one hundred years if they were convicted on all counts against them, And I think this is really a campaign that's a message to ransomware gangs that if they are caught, they face a price that's much higher than what they can extort through ransomware attacks. But whether that acts as an actual deterrent remains to be seen. Recently, the House of Representatives passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which most folks have heard of as the one point to trillion dollar infrastructure bill here in the United States. Now that there is a ton of stuff in that bill, and we're going to talk about a couple of tech related pieces. One of those is a sixty five billion dollar package to increase broadband internet access in the US. Most of that would go to subsidies to internet service providers that commit to building out broadband infrastructure into underserved areas. Some of the money will also go to subsidy programs that will help individual households so that they can afford broadband access plans and thus offset the cost that they would otherwise have to pay. These measures are a good step, but they represent a massive cut to what was originally in the bill. The original version of the bill set aside one hundred billion dollars to improve broadband access, so almost half of that got taken out by the time it finally was passed. Still, a little improvement is better than the status quo by definition, but it now falls to the various I s p s and the f c C to make sure that this plan actually leads to action and increased access once President Biden actually signs it into law. Of that is, so while the law is a good step in the right direction, it's not as big at step is what people were hoping for. And of course the activation is really what matters. Right. If these companies end up taking subsidies and then really drag their feet on actually building out the infrastructure, it doesn't really do anyone any good. And we have seen that kind of stuff happened in the past. Uh, hopefully that's not how it's gonna turn out this time. But um, you know, it's too early to say. We have a couple more stories that we're going to cover. But before we get to that, let's take another quick break. So I mentioned that there were a couple of pieces in that Infrastructure bill that related to tech. Well, another element is one that actually concerns me quite a bit, and I've talked about it in a previous tech Stuff tech News episode. So wrapped up in that Infrastructure bill is a mandate that car manufacturers will have to incorporate technology that can passively monitor drivers and identify whether or not the driver is operating a vehicle while impaired, and then go on to limit or prevent vehicle operation if the vehicle says, yeah, this person is kind of messed up. Now, let me be clear, if the technology we used to do this were amazingly accurate, and the implementation in systems that would limit motor vehicle operation were proven to be both effective and safe, I would be all for this. I don't want intoxicated or otherwise impaired drivers to operate vehicles, potentially putting themselves and others in severe danger. I don't want that to happen. I think driving well intoxicated is Honestly, I think of it as an unforgivable act because I think it shows a flagrant disregard for human life and safety, and it's so alien to me that I absolutely condemn it. However, my big problem is that the tech we have today isn't totally reliable. Now, car companies will have to start implementing this by around so it still gives us some time. But you also have to remember that incorporating this takes years, right, you have to you know, the whole process of developing a car can be a two year process, so it's really not that far out when you start thinking, oh, we have to incorporate this within the that really means that car companies have to actively start working on implementation by four And the fact that the tech is not fully reliable is a potentially enormous problem. Like you could have a car mistakenly identify someone as being intoxicated, and then that person would suddenly find that they can't drive their car. That would be a problem, right, even if they aren't actually inhibited in any other way, they wouldn't be able to use their car because the car had mistakenly identified them as being intoxicated. That's bad. But if the system fails to detect that someone is intoxicated when they actually are that's like having no system in there at all. Like, it's essentially the same as if you didn't have a system. So if it doesn't have a high enough level of accuracy and detecting it, you might as well not even have it. On top of that, we've seen with Tesla's autopilot and it's full self driving systems that features that are meant to take over for a human driver can sometimes be dangerous themselves. Now, I'm not saying that these systems are more dangerous than an inebriated driver, right that would be ridiculous for me to suggest. However, they haven't been proven to actually be safe. And so if you say let's replace this one definitively very unsafe act with another that has yet to be proven to be safe, that doesn't seem like it's a good move to me. I feel like this is an example of people who are relying upon technology to solve a problem that the tech just isn't up to solving yet. And again, I do get that this is a very real problem that we need a solution. We need to address the problem of drivers who drive under the influence, because they stand to be an enormous danger to others, and it's awful that there's not some you know, easy way to do this that does and involves severely restricting someone's freedom. I'm just worried that technology, at least as it is right now, is not the right solution, because you know, it's it's it's not it's not able to do what we are depending upon it to do. And if we dust off our hands and say, all right, we sorted that out, now, let's go on to the next problem, what we're really doing is just setting ourselves up for tragedy in the future when the tech falls short and people are still being people. That is, we still have some people who get inebriated and then insist on driving, and I you know, I'll also point out that there will be people who argue that this sort of thing kind of infringes on freedoms and whatnot. For the record, that's not my objection. I don't I'm not one of those people who says this tech is infringing upon my freedom because I don't believe in freedom extending to the point where you can put other people in danger. My argument is more along the lines of if I drink poison, getting someone to put a band aid on my finger is not solving the problem, right, It's not addressing the actual thing. The solution is not really a solution. And that's what I worry about when it comes to tech as a way of preventing drunk driving. I just I am not convinced that it actually is doing anything helpful. Now. Hopefully, by the time car companies have to, you know, work within this mandate because it is law now, maybe that will all be sorted out, and hopefully it means that we'll see a drastic reduction of injuries and deaths due to drivers who would otherwise be operating a vehicle while under the influence of alcohol or other intoxicating effects. I just I worry that it's not gonna be a real solution. All Right, I'm done. I know I wind on about that for way too long, but it's something that I recognize in a lot of places where people, you know, see a problem and they just say tech will sort that out, and they walk away without really without really coming up with an effective approach. The same thing, by the way, happens with climate change. I know tons of people who said we'll engineer our way out of climate change without actually proposing any actionable engineering approaches to dealing with climate change, which is the same thing as saying that's a future Jonathan problem. It never works out well for future Jonathan. Future Jonathan invariably hates present day Jonathan and really hates past Jonathan. I can say that with certainty. All Right, A while back, in fact, quite a bit ways back, I did a series of episodes about the company General Electric a k A. G E. In fact, I plan on running those episodes next week because I'm gonna be on vacation next week, so we're gonna rerun the g E episodes. But I've got an update to the GE story, and that's the company recently announced it is going to split into three separate companies over the near future. One is going to focus on energy, one company will focus on the healthcare industry, and the third company will focus on aviation. Now, this split again, it's not happening immediately. It's not like, you know, they just did a reverse Vultron. Instead, GE announced that it will spin off the healthcare organization sometime in the beginning of three and then the energy division will spin off sometime in early The idea is that each individual company will be more focused with its own specific leadership in order to direct company efforts to excel in those specific industries without having to worry about the other division. Current ge CEO Lawrence Culp said he will lead the Aviation division and that's the one that is going to hold on to the g E name. And finally, Nintendo has given video game console fans something to look forward to. The company announced in an earning skull the plans to release a brand new video game console. So the Switch, which is Nintendo's most recent console, launched in ten and Nintendo gave the Switch a little bit of a glow up earlier this year, releasing an O led screen version that had some modest tweaks, uh, the biggest one being a larger, brighter screen that was an old screen, but not nothing revolutionary like it was a It was an incremental step, not a not like a full premium upgrade. But they're also had not been any word of a successor to the Nintendo Switch, So this is really big news. When can you expect the as yet unnamed Nintendo console, Well, it will happen sometime between today and December thirty one, two thousand YEP. According to the slide deck in the earnings call, we should expect a new console sometime in the year two zero x x, so that means sometime in the next seventy two years or so we should get a new Nintendo console. Now, sure you could argue that's not really news at all, because surely Nintendo would release something between now and the end of the century. But to you, I say, come on, get off my back. I wanted something silly to end this episode with, and this one one out all right. That is the tech news for Tuesday, November nine, twenty one. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of Tech Stuff, reach out to me. The best way to do that is with Twitter. Use the Twitter handled text stuff H s W and that'll get in touch with me. Also, as a reminder, I am on vacation. Next week we will be rerunning the g E Story episodes and on Thursday, I believe we will have of next week we will have a Smart Talks with IBM episode and then I'll be back the following week and we will be back to business as usual. And until all that time, I'll talk to you again, really Sion like tomorrow text Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.