Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland. I'mind executive producer with I Heart Radio and how the tech area. It's time for the tech news for Thursday, September one, two thousand twenty two. And since I didn't do a news episode Tuesday, I missed out on talking about how NASA had to scrub the launch of the Artemis one mission on Monday. So Artemis is the program that aims to put America back on the Moon, as it were. It's actually a little more than that. It includes future lunar lander missions, which would start with Artemis three that's currently projected to take place in assuming there are no delays. And also it includes the construction of a lunar orbit space station. And it's a somewhat controversial program. Uh. There are critics who questioned whether the Artemis program will actually serve its stated purpose, namely to not just gather more information about the Moon, but to serve as kind of a stepping stone towards sending astronauts to Mars. But whether you support Artemis or you're critical of it, we'll have to wait until Saturday at the earliest for the launch of the Artemis one. This will test NASA's new super heavy launch vehicle, the Space Launch System or s l S, and it will also test an unscrewed Orion spacecraft as and no crew will be aboard this Orion capsule. Uh, it won't have a human crew anyway. There will be some mannequins and a plush stuffed toy in there. The toy is meant to indicate when the the spacecraft encounters micro gravity because it will be able to float freely around the happen. So why was there a delay? Why did they have to cancel Monday's launch? Well? On Monday, NASA engineers noted that one of the engines in the s l S appeared to be failing to reach the proper temperature. There were indications that the system that cools the engines with liquid hydrogen had some sort of problem, or that the sensors that detect engine temperature we're having a problem and we're misreading the actual temperature of the engines. And that's what prompted NASA to scrub the launch on Monday, as well as the planned celebrity appearances like Jack Black who were meant to commemorate the historic event whoop see. NASA hopes to launch on Saturday, September three, but there's a chance that weather will force another delay. The next available launch date would be September five. As for my own opinions on the Artemis project, well, on the one hand, there's no denying that sending people to the Moon is a t inphant achievement. That's an achievement that doubtlessly inspires countless people to pursue an interest in space and engineering and related subjects. And I'm certain that along the way, NASA and its partners will develop incredible technologies that will ultimately be able to use in other arenas, which is really cool. But I am not fully sold on Artemis as a whole, though I also sympathize with NASA because the agency has had to grapple with the consequences of the cancellation of the old Constellation program, which actually was the source for some of the elements of Artemis, including the Orion spacecraft that started off as part of the Constellation program and that got the the acts back in the Obama administration and other space news. NASA engineers figured out what was going haywire with Voyager one's Attitude Articulation and Control system a k A. The A A c S. All right, quick recap So, ag OR one is a space probe and it launched way back in nineteen. It is flown by Jupiter and Saturn and then continue to travel out beyond the boundaries of our Solar system, meaning it is now in interstellar space. This spacecraft is almost as old as I am, and it continues to send data back to us here on Earth courtesy of the Deep Space Network. However, earlier this year, the A A c S started sending corrupted messages about the spacecraft's telemetry. Engineers determined that the spacecraft was still operating properly, so nothing was wrong with the craft's actual operations, so it was kind of a mystery why these messages were getting garbled. But it turned out that some subroutine was referencing a computer system aboard Voyage or one that has long since been out of service. It stopped working ages ago, and that this is what caused the corruption in commune occasion. So the engineers redirected Voyagers A A CS to route the information to the working computer, which is what it was supposed to do in the first place, and this that did solve the issue that now communications are coming in clearly, but the engineers still need to identify whatever it was that caused the issue in the first place, that that prompted the a CS to try and reference this computer that hasn't been working for agents, because it's possible that it could happen again and trigger a a CS to start sending out garbled stuff once more. But personally, I just think it's an amazing achievement to have a spacecraft that's almost as old as I am to continue to provide us information even as the probe ventures further out from our solar system. Over in the U S State of California, there is an energy crisis in full swing. The state expects a nasty heat wave in the very near future the next couple of days. In fact, that could stretch on for several days, and that's probably gonna prompt a large consumer demand for electricity to power stuff like air conditioners. But the California Independent System Operator had issued a Level one energy emergency alert just yesterday on Wednesday, and that means that on Wednesday, all available power supplies were essentially tapped out, and that would mean that any additional demand would be unmet, and it could mean that the state will have to use things like rolling blackouts. To handle problems like this, the state has authorized fossil fuel power plants to increase production in order to meet demand, and has also granted businesses permission to lean on stuff like backup generators to supply some of their electrical needs, which would relieve the power grid of a little bit of the burden. Climate change has truly exacerbated this issue. I mean, you know, heat waves or weather. We're not talking about climate with weather, though you could argue and increase in heat waves is an indication of climate change, and individ dual one is weather, but really climate change. In this case, we're talking about this massive drought that's happening in the West, and that has led to decreased production at hydro electric power stations. So you can't rely on hydro electric power if you don't have enough water to to drive the turbines properly. So the past couple of years have been tumultuous in terms of power production and distribution around the world, not just in California, and that's due to a combination of a lot of complicated factors. So in some regions cough Texas cough, you have some bad government decisions that have led to energy crises. Uh, you have climate change that's impacting power needs and production strategies. You also have big political UH and and social crises like Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which has caused a massive crisis in Europe. And while there's an increased move to adopt renewable energy solutions, which in a aisition to cutting back on on carbon emissions also provides more national security because you become more self reliant. That is more of a long term kind of commitment. The near term is going to present us with some very tough situations that we're going to have to address before we can enjoy the benefits of a more robust renewable energy strategy. So it's just a harsh reality that we're going to have to continue to deal with over the next few years. Microsoft is facing a bit of opposition in the UK when it comes to the company's planned acquisition of Activision Blizzard. So that deal is valued at nearly seventy billion dollars all told, and it has had no shortage of drama surrounding it. For one thing, Activision Blizzard has been at a high profile controversy regarding corporate work culture, as well as the fact that the company has had some pretty well repled ordered instances of resisting employee efforts to unionize and a lot more than that. But the scrutiny in the UK has more to do with anti competitiveness than any alleged toxicity in Activision Blizzards work environment. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority or c m A maybe dialing up at scrutiny into this deal, asking if perhaps this acquisition would lead to reduced competition in the video games market, that it could consolidate Microsoft's power in several areas relating to video games and prevent competitors from making an impact. Now, Microsoft reps are proactively arguing that the company isn't going to lock Activision Blizzard titles within the Microsoft ecosystem and prevent others from being able to have those titles on their platforms. In fact, that Microsoft has said that there would be no profit in keeping the titles off of competing platforms like Sony's PlayStation console. Microsoft is a say actually saying it would make no sense to keep everything for ourselves because we don't have enough of the market share to make that a profitable business. Whether the regulators in the UK find that answer satisfactory or not remains to be seen. At any rate, Microsoft is pushing ahead with this deal, which should close sometime before the summer of next year, assuming that regulators don't block it. All right, We've got a lot more stories to cover before we do that. Let's take a quick break. The Verge reports it received an internal memo from Meta that says the company is looking into possible paid features for its various platforms like Instagram and Facebook. To date, Mena has relied almost completely on ad revenues. Something like of the company's revenue comes from ad sales. However, recent developments such as Apple launching its app tracking transparency framework, has had a massively negative impact on Meta's business model. Meanwhile, the company has been spending billions in an effort to define the metaverse, which has not gone completely smoothly. I should add, and there's a general downturn in advertising spend due to fears of an economic recession, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that Meta would look into alternate ways to generate revenue directly from its users. Some of Meta's products already have some paid features in them, so this would likely be an expansion of that approach. The Verge reports that Meta's VP of Monetization, John Hedgeman, has indicated that the company is not looking to offer an ad free experience in exchange for some sort of subscription model. So if you were hoping to totally opt out of ads on Facebook or Instagram or whatever, it looks like that is not on the table. It will be interesting to what if any paid features emerge from this and how the users on Meta's various platforms receive them. Meta is not the only company looking for more ways to generate cash from its users. Disney, which, let's face it, is top of the class when it comes to finding ways to coax more cash from folks, is reportedly looking at ways to entice Disney Plus viewers to buy themed merchandise. So reportedly, it's looking at using QR codes and the Disney Plus app, according to The Wall Street Journal, and I guess the idea is that Disney will throw a QR code up on screen alongside or before or after some sort of particular programming, and interested viewers can use their Disney Plus app to scan the code and go to a related page on the online Disney store. So one idea is to make exclusive merchandise available on this platform, so you can't buy it any other way and you can't get to the page without using this kind of QR scanning process. And Disney definitely knows that if you limit something's accessibility, you can really drive consumer interest in a product. See also Disney popcorn buckets. It is wild, y'all. Anyway, That's just one of the strategies that the company is looking into. It's also reportedly considering an Amazon Prime like service that would allow fans to receive certain benefits in return for a subscription. I'm not sure what those benefits would be exactly. I'm also not entirely convinced this QR code strategy will be a huge success, only because companies have been trying to leverage viewers and convert them into active customers for a while and it has been met with limited success. Um, you know, it's just it's hard to get people to become conversions, right, to convert from viewer to customer, and especially if it's not something like a mobile or or you know, desktop experience. Those are already challenging enough to get people to go from being sort of a passive consumer to an active customer, but it gets even harder when you start stepping away from that particular user experience. So if you're watching something like on a television, it's way harder to get people to actively convert into being a customer just based upon the experience of watching something on a screen. You know, it doesn't mean that this is destined for failure. I just mean that it's it's hard to get that to work. Disney might have cracked the code on it, I don't know. There are definitely cases where tons of people scanned a QR code that popped up on a screen just to see where it would take them. By the way, I think that's a habit that you should really think about first before you indulge in it, because, I mean, there's nothing stopping someone from putting a QR code up in a prominent place, and that cod it leads you to a site where it starts a download of malware onto your device. There's that's an entirely real possibility. It's not likely to pop up in Disney, you know, material, but it's still something you should think about. Like a QR code is not just an open invitation. It could have some sinister intent behind it. Just keep that in mind anyway. I think the most successful cases I've seen of people scanning QR codes have in cases where people were just curious, what the heck is this and was it going to bring me to as opposed to I like what I'm seeing on the screen, and I want to buy that T shirt. But maybe I'm just completely out of touch on this one. A few weeks ago, I mentioned that the FCC negated a previous arrangement with space X's satellite based internet service Starlink that would have seen Starlink received nearly nine hundred million dollars in federal aid. Now. The reasons for this annulment range from skepticism Starlink would actually provide services to areas that most need broadband access. That's the whole purpose of the program anyway, is to extend broadband access to areas that otherwise lack it, and at least in some of the Starlink use cases, reportedly they were in areas that are already very well served by other providers. But another part of skepticism was directed to whether or not starlink service would meet the performance benchmarks when it was at scale as per of the FCCS requirements. In other words, that once Starlink hit it's you know, proposed scale, that it would actually be able to provide the broadband level of service that would qualify it for the grant in the first place. So all that money was scrapped for Starlink anyway, while Starlink was shown the door. The FCC has started to award money to other broadband service providers, six of them right now. So in total, nearly a hundred million dollars is going to get divvied up between these six providers to provide broadband service to more than three d fifty thousand homes in the US across nineteen states. Now, my state of Georgia is not among them, gosh darn't, which is a shame because I know for a fact there are plenty of communities in the state that have no broadband access so far. But really, this is just the beginning of the United States is pushed to extend broadband access to more citizens across the country, particularly in remote and rural areas. Truth Social, the social network most commonly associated with former President Donald Trump after he was essentially booted from all the established platforms like Facebook and Twitter, has consistently failed to get Google to allow the truth Social android based app into the Google Play Store. And at issue is truth Social's comment moderation practices, or perhaps I should say the lack of those. So Google has a policy that any any sort of site that has user generated content, like a social network app, has to have a content moderation policy in place, and it also has to enforce that policy. And while truth social has a policy, the proliferation of threats of physical violence and similar content that is reportedly on truth social has not been properly moderated according to Google, and so it has not been accepted into the Google Play Store. It has been accepted in the Apple App Store. You can get it on iOS. You cannot get on Android, which restricts truth Social's reach considerably since Android is the dominant operating system in the mobile market. Reportedly, truth Social is also a bit of of an you with finances right now. Right Forge, a web hosting platform known for um hosting a lot of right wing services, and Websites says that truth Social currently has about a one point six million dollar bill that it has yet to pay. Okay, we've got a few more stories to go before we get to those. Let's take another quick break. Recent restrictions regarding chips sales from the US to China and Russia, really just China, are likely going to cost Nvidia a lot of money, according to CNBC, and Video says it received an order from the US government on August that will place a licensing requirement for certain types of exports to China and Russia. Now and Video says, there ain't nobody in Russia who's an invidio paying customer, and to me, that implies that in Russia, folks are turning to either aftermarkets or maybe even black markets to get hold of in Nvidia tech, but they're not buying it straight from the Nvidia. However, China represents around four hundred million dollars in potential sales for this quarter alone. The US government is concerned that China's military is scooping up in Vidia hardware in order to build out various military based systems and in an effort to perhaps pump the brakes a bit on fueling China's military complex. The US has put these new restrictions in place that will slow things down, But in the meantime, companies like Nvidia and a m D, which also acknowledged that it received a similar message from the U. S government, are going to face challenges because these licensing requirements are going to strike off entire product lines for Chinese markets for these companies, and that represents a massive loss in revenue. Uh. Yeah, It's a complicated situation because you can see from a national security standpoint why the US would want to restrict the export of these kinds of technologies to China, a country that also has a a reputation earned or otherwise of stealing technology by copying it. So yeah, complicated issue. Now. A lot of time on this show, I talk about tech and its role in surveillance. I talk about how a lot of us are willing participants in that kind of system. A lot of us are providing endless amounts of data about ourselves as we navigate the online world. And then there are other cases where agencies like the military and the police are relying upon to be generous questionable technology, supposedly in an effort to protect people and property, but often coming along with it are real world consequences of disproportionate harm to certain populations, mostly the non white ones. But what about AI that's looking to see if you have an unreported swimming pool that you should be paying property taxes on? All? Right, now, this story emerges out of France, land of croissants and the cone heads, if we're to believe their cover story, Shout out if you get that reference. Anyway. In France, there are property tax laws that set tax rates based on a property's rental value. Meaning if your property has a lot of stuff that would make it an attractive rental, you're gonna have to pay extra taxes on that. Verandah's extra tax an extension to your home boom extra tax and swimming pools. Oh yeah, that's that's more property tax. But the government suspected that people were being entirely forthcoming when it comes to stuff like this, so they tapped a company called cap Gemini to scan satellite data and look for signs of unreported architectural enhancements, mostly swimming pools, and the tech, after some tweaking and some learning, uh, ended up returning more than twenty thousand instances of swimming pools throughout France, and that represents about ten million euros worth of untaxed property. So on the one hand, boo for more surveillance, I'm never a fan of that. But on the other, boo for tax evasion. I mean, tax evasion is not a good thing either. Though you could argue that the tax law in the first place is already dumb or unfair and should be changed, and I could be persuaded to see validity in that argument, but yeah, it's hard for me to side with folks who are actively attempting to avoid paying taxes. Our next story takes us to Surrey, a region in the UK that's southwest of Greater London. There, residents are complaining that police are misusing the Ways navigation app Ways allows users to indicate spots where drivers should use extra care, such as areas where they're is an accident or traffic congestion, or you know, where there's a member of the fuzz lying in wait in a speed trap. So drivers using Ways can set up a little icon to indicate that there are coppers up ahead waiting to catch speed demons, and thus when drivers see that icon, they slow down. Now. The complaint is that the Surrey police have been activating this feature as they drive around on patrol, so they're indicating that there's a speed trap when in reality there isn't one. And the feature is meant to indicate, you know, the speed trap, which is a stationary thing, right, Like that's where a cop is lying in wait, just ready to pull over someone for going over the speed limit. But in this case, the cops are in cars that are on the move, so they're actually in motion. However, the icon will stay wherever they set it up, because the icon is thought to be like, well, this is an indication the stationary police unit. So drivers are going to see these icons for speed traps and they slow down, but there's no actual cop there. They were tricked into slowing down and obeying the law. It's unfair that has drivers mad. How dare the police misused tech that is meant to allow speeding drivers to avoid detection. The police have said, look, when we use the app, we were at that location. It's just that we happen to move immediately afterwards. And besides, we cannot be everywhere, and this does cut down on people driving beyond the speed limit. So, like the story about France, this is one where people who want to break the rules are exasperated when the government agency figures out how to leverage technology that makes it harder to do that. And again, it's kind of hard for me to feel sympathy towards the drivers here, largely because speeding often contributes to car accidents and moreover, uh two car accidents that result in terrible injury and fatality. So I don't feel terribly bad for the drivers who were tricked into obeying the law. That just doesn't strike me as something I should be mad about. Um, I think it's kind of amusing. Have you ever played the board game Monopoly and encountered the community chess card that reads bank error in your favor? Well, in Monopoly, if you get that card, you net a cool two hundred bucks. Well, inject that with steroids and you have what happened to a Crypto dot com customer not too long ago. The customer was asking for a sixty eight dollar refund, but Crypto dot Com made a teen sy weed see little mistake and accidentally gave her seven point to million dollars, And then no one at Crypto noticed. For like half a year. I mean, can you imagine seeing a seven million dollar plus amount hit your account. Well, Crypto is now going after this customer in court, demanding that she payback not just the seven point two million smack aous, but interest on top of that. Yikes. At the Colorado State Fair, a digital painting titled Tatra Dopora spatial which I know I butchered the French pronunciation, but whatever, it took home the Blue Ribbon first prize in the digital category, and a subsequent revelation sparked massive controversy because see the credited artist, Jason Allen, revealed that he had used an AI program called mid Journey to generate this image after giving it a specific prompt that he hasn't revealed. Then he fed this resulting image into Gigga pixel AI in order to upscale them before printing the finished work on a canvas and submitting it for a consideration. In other words, this work of art was primarily machine generated, although Alan argues that without his involvement there would be no image at all, so there's still some human element to it. But this has really ticked off a lot of artists, and some of them are calling this the death of artistry itself. Now I wouldn't go that far, but it does raise a ton of ethical questions, right, I mean, if we're to celebrate human artistic achievement, then we need the assurances that a work has come from you know, a human. I think that is hard to argue against, but we also have to acknowledge it is an amazing feat to have reached a point where an AI program can generate a work of digital art and a level of sophistication and beauty that can be award winning when placed up against human competitors. Like that is a phenomenal thing too, I think if it's similar to the way of it being amazing once we reached a point where we could does I a chess playing program capable of beating a human chess master? However, there are social questions to consider. Could machines ultimately displace creatives in creative jobs? Is the benefit to the general public not great enough to potentially justify wiping out creative professionals, you know? And what the heck will creative professionals? What will artists do if that happens? I mean, you could argue get a real job, I guess, But that is absolutely inhumane and cruel. I mean that's like saying, hey, this method of expression that's critical to you and that lets you earn a living doing what feeds your soul. Yeah, you don't get to do that anymore. Go get a job at a desk. Yeah no, thanks. So, yeah, this is a complicated thing. Now. Of course, keep in mind I say that as a content creator, right, So clearly I have a vested interest in this kind of thing. So I admit I have a very strong bias when it comes to this story because I've got stake in this as well. But ultimately, the argument is we shouldn't reward this process where we're displacing people from work, especially when there's nothing underneath too protect like there's no safety net for people, and that this ultimately could apply to any kind of job, right that this is the fear of automation replacing humans, and currently the focus in the industry is to augment human achievement, not to replace it. But there's still this underlying fear that automatic systems, machine learning, artificial intelligence are ultimately going to displace us. But then you follow that up with the question, well, if it did, that becomes an unsupportable system, right, because if no one has a job, no one has money to buy the stuff that's being made, and then the companies that have created all the automated systems in the first place no longer have customers, and the whole thing comes tumbling down in itself. So clearly we have to come up with a solution that addresses this, whether it's moving away from AI and automation, which seems unlikely, or coming up with an alternative to the old model of do this work and we will give you money, which allows you to eat and clothe yourself, etcetera. But that's a whole discussion for another episode. Finally, Dungeons and Dragons recently released a new spell Jammer expansion to D and D. The original spell Jammer rules came out, I believe way back in second edition days, because I owned the original box set back then and I never went beyond second edition rules when I was playing D and D regularly. Now, the rules allow players two board magical ships that ascend into the heavens and allow characters to traverse space or the ether itself to visit New World's new planes of existence. I've actually heard some fairly harsh criticism about this new generation of spell Jammer rules, but that's not really what I wanted to chat about here. Instead, in an effort to promote the release of the new rules, Wizards of the Coast inserted a twenty sided die a k a. A D twenty into the model of a spell Jammer ship with a little bubble on top of it to keep the D twenty in place, and then attached the ship to a balloon and released it in the California Desert. The company released a video that spans more than two hours where a camera positioned to look right at this model with the D twenty inside of it shows the ascent and it is titled Launching a Dice to Space, and that has at least two errors in that title, at least if you're being super pedantic, because traditionally dice is the plural of die. Now, I will admit, in modern vernacular folks will use the word dice to denote a single die. So I guess I can let that one slide because language does evolve, and if you argue against it, well you're really just being pedantic for no reason. I mean, I still use die to refer to a single dice, But I'm a dying breed, so it still irks me. But the other error is the bit about going to space. You cannot get to space on a balloon. You can get super duper high up in the atmosphere. You can, you know, get way up there, as bomb Gardner showed us. And depending upon whose definition of space you're using, you can argue that you're at the edge of space. You know, there are different definitions for where space begins. But the fact remains that a helium balloon can only rise as long as the balloon is lighter than the air surrounding it, And eventually you get to a point where the air is so thin that the balloon and the air around it are at the same weight, so the balloon can rise no further than that. So really I would argue the D twenty went super duper high up in the air way above the clouds even but space. Nah, it didn't pass that saving throw. That's it for the Tech News for Thursday September one, two thousand twenty two. If you would like to reach out with suggestions for topics for me to cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, you can do that in a couple of ways. One is to download the i heart Radio app. It's free to download. Navigate over to the tech Stuff part of the app. There's a little microphone icon there you can click on that leave a message up to thirty seconds in length. The other way is to reach out to me on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Yeah. Text Stuff is an i heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland. I'mind executive producer with I Heart Radio and how the tech area. It's time for the tech news for Thursday, September one, two thousand twenty two. And since I didn't do a news episode Tuesday, I missed out on talking about how NASA had to scrub the launch of the Artemis one mission on Monday. So Artemis is the program that aims to put America back on the Moon, as it were. It's actually a little more than that. It includes future lunar lander missions, which would start with Artemis three that's currently projected to take place in assuming there are no delays. And also it includes the construction of a lunar orbit space station. And it's a somewhat controversial program. Uh. There are critics who questioned whether the Artemis program will actually serve its stated purpose, namely to not just gather more information about the Moon, but to serve as kind of a stepping stone towards sending astronauts to Mars. But whether you support Artemis or you're critical of it, we'll have to wait until Saturday at the earliest for the launch of the Artemis one. This will test NASA's new super heavy launch vehicle, the Space Launch System or s l S, and it will also test an unscrewed Orion spacecraft as and no crew will be aboard this Orion capsule. Uh, it won't have a human crew anyway. There will be some mannequins and a plush stuffed toy in there. The toy is meant to indicate when the the spacecraft encounters micro gravity because it will be able to float freely around the happen. So why was there a delay? Why did they have to cancel Monday's launch? Well? On Monday, NASA engineers noted that one of the engines in the s l S appeared to be failing to reach the proper temperature. There were indications that the system that cools the engines with liquid hydrogen had some sort of problem, or that the sensors that detect engine temperature we're having a problem and we're misreading the actual temperature of the engines. And that's what prompted NASA to scrub the launch on Monday, as well as the planned celebrity appearances like Jack Black who were meant to commemorate the historic event whoop see. NASA hopes to launch on Saturday, September three, but there's a chance that weather will force another delay. The next available launch date would be September five. As for my own opinions on the Artemis project, well, on the one hand, there's no denying that sending people to the Moon is a t inphant achievement. That's an achievement that doubtlessly inspires countless people to pursue an interest in space and engineering and related subjects. And I'm certain that along the way, NASA and its partners will develop incredible technologies that will ultimately be able to use in other arenas, which is really cool. But I am not fully sold on Artemis as a whole, though I also sympathize with NASA because the agency has had to grapple with the consequences of the cancellation of the old Constellation program, which actually was the source for some of the elements of Artemis, including the Orion spacecraft that started off as part of the Constellation program and that got the the acts back in the Obama administration and other space news. NASA engineers figured out what was going haywire with Voyager one's Attitude Articulation and Control system a k A. The A A c S. All right, quick recap So, ag OR one is a space probe and it launched way back in nineteen. It is flown by Jupiter and Saturn and then continue to travel out beyond the boundaries of our Solar system, meaning it is now in interstellar space. This spacecraft is almost as old as I am, and it continues to send data back to us here on Earth courtesy of the Deep Space Network. However, earlier this year, the A A c S started sending corrupted messages about the spacecraft's telemetry. Engineers determined that the spacecraft was still operating properly, so nothing was wrong with the craft's actual operations, so it was kind of a mystery why these messages were getting garbled. But it turned out that some subroutine was referencing a computer system aboard Voyage or one that has long since been out of service. It stopped working ages ago, and that this is what caused the corruption in commune occasion. So the engineers redirected Voyagers A A CS to route the information to the working computer, which is what it was supposed to do in the first place, and this that did solve the issue that now communications are coming in clearly, but the engineers still need to identify whatever it was that caused the issue in the first place, that that prompted the a CS to try and reference this computer that hasn't been working for agents, because it's possible that it could happen again and trigger a a CS to start sending out garbled stuff once more. But personally, I just think it's an amazing achievement to have a spacecraft that's almost as old as I am to continue to provide us information even as the probe ventures further out from our solar system. Over in the U S State of California, there is an energy crisis in full swing. The state expects a nasty heat wave in the very near future the next couple of days. In fact, that could stretch on for several days, and that's probably gonna prompt a large consumer demand for electricity to power stuff like air conditioners. But the California Independent System Operator had issued a Level one energy emergency alert just yesterday on Wednesday, and that means that on Wednesday, all available power supplies were essentially tapped out, and that would mean that any additional demand would be unmet, and it could mean that the state will have to use things like rolling blackouts. To handle problems like this, the state has authorized fossil fuel power plants to increase production in order to meet demand, and has also granted businesses permission to lean on stuff like backup generators to supply some of their electrical needs, which would relieve the power grid of a little bit of the burden. Climate change has truly exacerbated this issue. I mean, you know, heat waves or weather. We're not talking about climate with weather, though you could argue and increase in heat waves is an indication of climate change, and individ dual one is weather, but really climate change. In this case, we're talking about this massive drought that's happening in the West, and that has led to decreased production at hydro electric power stations. So you can't rely on hydro electric power if you don't have enough water to to drive the turbines properly. So the past couple of years have been tumultuous in terms of power production and distribution around the world, not just in California, and that's due to a combination of a lot of complicated factors. So in some regions cough Texas cough, you have some bad government decisions that have led to energy crises. Uh, you have climate change that's impacting power needs and production strategies. You also have big political UH and and social crises like Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which has caused a massive crisis in Europe. And while there's an increased move to adopt renewable energy solutions, which in a aisition to cutting back on on carbon emissions also provides more national security because you become more self reliant. That is more of a long term kind of commitment. The near term is going to present us with some very tough situations that we're going to have to address before we can enjoy the benefits of a more robust renewable energy strategy. So it's just a harsh reality that we're going to have to continue to deal with over the next few years. Microsoft is facing a bit of opposition in the UK when it comes to the company's planned acquisition of Activision Blizzard. So that deal is valued at nearly seventy billion dollars all told, and it has had no shortage of drama surrounding it. For one thing, Activision Blizzard has been at a high profile controversy regarding corporate work culture, as well as the fact that the company has had some pretty well repled ordered instances of resisting employee efforts to unionize and a lot more than that. But the scrutiny in the UK has more to do with anti competitiveness than any alleged toxicity in Activision Blizzards work environment. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority or c m A maybe dialing up at scrutiny into this deal, asking if perhaps this acquisition would lead to reduced competition in the video games market, that it could consolidate Microsoft's power in several areas relating to video games and prevent competitors from making an impact. Now, Microsoft reps are proactively arguing that the company isn't going to lock Activision Blizzard titles within the Microsoft ecosystem and prevent others from being able to have those titles on their platforms. In fact, that Microsoft has said that there would be no profit in keeping the titles off of competing platforms like Sony's PlayStation console. Microsoft is a say actually saying it would make no sense to keep everything for ourselves because we don't have enough of the market share to make that a profitable business. Whether the regulators in the UK find that answer satisfactory or not remains to be seen. At any rate, Microsoft is pushing ahead with this deal, which should close sometime before the summer of next year, assuming that regulators don't block it. All right, We've got a lot more stories to cover before we do that. Let's take a quick break. The Verge reports it received an internal memo from Meta that says the company is looking into possible paid features for its various platforms like Instagram and Facebook. To date, Mena has relied almost completely on ad revenues. Something like of the company's revenue comes from ad sales. However, recent developments such as Apple launching its app tracking transparency framework, has had a massively negative impact on Meta's business model. Meanwhile, the company has been spending billions in an effort to define the metaverse, which has not gone completely smoothly. I should add, and there's a general downturn in advertising spend due to fears of an economic recession, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that Meta would look into alternate ways to generate revenue directly from its users. Some of Meta's products already have some paid features in them, so this would likely be an expansion of that approach. The Verge reports that Meta's VP of Monetization, John Hedgeman, has indicated that the company is not looking to offer an ad free experience in exchange for some sort of subscription model. So if you were hoping to totally opt out of ads on Facebook or Instagram or whatever, it looks like that is not on the table. It will be interesting to what if any paid features emerge from this and how the users on Meta's various platforms receive them. Meta is not the only company looking for more ways to generate cash from its users. Disney, which, let's face it, is top of the class when it comes to finding ways to coax more cash from folks, is reportedly looking at ways to entice Disney Plus viewers to buy themed merchandise. So reportedly, it's looking at using QR codes and the Disney Plus app, according to The Wall Street Journal, and I guess the idea is that Disney will throw a QR code up on screen alongside or before or after some sort of particular programming, and interested viewers can use their Disney Plus app to scan the code and go to a related page on the online Disney store. So one idea is to make exclusive merchandise available on this platform, so you can't buy it any other way and you can't get to the page without using this kind of QR scanning process. And Disney definitely knows that if you limit something's accessibility, you can really drive consumer interest in a product. See also Disney popcorn buckets. It is wild, y'all. Anyway, That's just one of the strategies that the company is looking into. It's also reportedly considering an Amazon Prime like service that would allow fans to receive certain benefits in return for a subscription. I'm not sure what those benefits would be exactly. I'm also not entirely convinced this QR code strategy will be a huge success, only because companies have been trying to leverage viewers and convert them into active customers for a while and it has been met with limited success. Um, you know, it's just it's hard to get people to become conversions, right, to convert from viewer to customer, and especially if it's not something like a mobile or or you know, desktop experience. Those are already challenging enough to get people to go from being sort of a passive consumer to an active customer, but it gets even harder when you start stepping away from that particular user experience. So if you're watching something like on a television, it's way harder to get people to actively convert into being a customer just based upon the experience of watching something on a screen. You know, it doesn't mean that this is destined for failure. I just mean that it's it's hard to get that to work. Disney might have cracked the code on it, I don't know. There are definitely cases where tons of people scanned a QR code that popped up on a screen just to see where it would take them. By the way, I think that's a habit that you should really think about first before you indulge in it, because, I mean, there's nothing stopping someone from putting a QR code up in a prominent place, and that cod it leads you to a site where it starts a download of malware onto your device. There's that's an entirely real possibility. It's not likely to pop up in Disney, you know, material, but it's still something you should think about. Like a QR code is not just an open invitation. It could have some sinister intent behind it. Just keep that in mind anyway. I think the most successful cases I've seen of people scanning QR codes have in cases where people were just curious, what the heck is this and was it going to bring me to as opposed to I like what I'm seeing on the screen, and I want to buy that T shirt. But maybe I'm just completely out of touch on this one. A few weeks ago, I mentioned that the FCC negated a previous arrangement with space X's satellite based internet service Starlink that would have seen Starlink received nearly nine hundred million dollars in federal aid. Now. The reasons for this annulment range from skepticism Starlink would actually provide services to areas that most need broadband access. That's the whole purpose of the program anyway, is to extend broadband access to areas that otherwise lack it, and at least in some of the Starlink use cases, reportedly they were in areas that are already very well served by other providers. But another part of skepticism was directed to whether or not starlink service would meet the performance benchmarks when it was at scale as per of the FCCS requirements. In other words, that once Starlink hit it's you know, proposed scale, that it would actually be able to provide the broadband level of service that would qualify it for the grant in the first place. So all that money was scrapped for Starlink anyway, while Starlink was shown the door. The FCC has started to award money to other broadband service providers, six of them right now. So in total, nearly a hundred million dollars is going to get divvied up between these six providers to provide broadband service to more than three d fifty thousand homes in the US across nineteen states. Now, my state of Georgia is not among them, gosh darn't, which is a shame because I know for a fact there are plenty of communities in the state that have no broadband access so far. But really, this is just the beginning of the United States is pushed to extend broadband access to more citizens across the country, particularly in remote and rural areas. Truth Social, the social network most commonly associated with former President Donald Trump after he was essentially booted from all the established platforms like Facebook and Twitter, has consistently failed to get Google to allow the truth Social android based app into the Google Play Store. And at issue is truth Social's comment moderation practices, or perhaps I should say the lack of those. So Google has a policy that any any sort of site that has user generated content, like a social network app, has to have a content moderation policy in place, and it also has to enforce that policy. And while truth social has a policy, the proliferation of threats of physical violence and similar content that is reportedly on truth social has not been properly moderated according to Google, and so it has not been accepted into the Google Play Store. It has been accepted in the Apple App Store. You can get it on iOS. You cannot get on Android, which restricts truth Social's reach considerably since Android is the dominant operating system in the mobile market. Reportedly, truth Social is also a bit of of an you with finances right now. Right Forge, a web hosting platform known for um hosting a lot of right wing services, and Websites says that truth Social currently has about a one point six million dollar bill that it has yet to pay. Okay, we've got a few more stories to go before we get to those. Let's take another quick break. Recent restrictions regarding chips sales from the US to China and Russia, really just China, are likely going to cost Nvidia a lot of money, according to CNBC, and Video says it received an order from the US government on August that will place a licensing requirement for certain types of exports to China and Russia. Now and Video says, there ain't nobody in Russia who's an invidio paying customer, and to me, that implies that in Russia, folks are turning to either aftermarkets or maybe even black markets to get hold of in Nvidia tech, but they're not buying it straight from the Nvidia. However, China represents around four hundred million dollars in potential sales for this quarter alone. The US government is concerned that China's military is scooping up in Vidia hardware in order to build out various military based systems and in an effort to perhaps pump the brakes a bit on fueling China's military complex. The US has put these new restrictions in place that will slow things down, But in the meantime, companies like Nvidia and a m D, which also acknowledged that it received a similar message from the U. S government, are going to face challenges because these licensing requirements are going to strike off entire product lines for Chinese markets for these companies, and that represents a massive loss in revenue. Uh. Yeah, It's a complicated situation because you can see from a national security standpoint why the US would want to restrict the export of these kinds of technologies to China, a country that also has a a reputation earned or otherwise of stealing technology by copying it. So yeah, complicated issue. Now. A lot of time on this show, I talk about tech and its role in surveillance. I talk about how a lot of us are willing participants in that kind of system. A lot of us are providing endless amounts of data about ourselves as we navigate the online world. And then there are other cases where agencies like the military and the police are relying upon to be generous questionable technology, supposedly in an effort to protect people and property, but often coming along with it are real world consequences of disproportionate harm to certain populations, mostly the non white ones. But what about AI that's looking to see if you have an unreported swimming pool that you should be paying property taxes on? All? Right, now, this story emerges out of France, land of croissants and the cone heads, if we're to believe their cover story, Shout out if you get that reference. Anyway. In France, there are property tax laws that set tax rates based on a property's rental value. Meaning if your property has a lot of stuff that would make it an attractive rental, you're gonna have to pay extra taxes on that. Verandah's extra tax an extension to your home boom extra tax and swimming pools. Oh yeah, that's that's more property tax. But the government suspected that people were being entirely forthcoming when it comes to stuff like this, so they tapped a company called cap Gemini to scan satellite data and look for signs of unreported architectural enhancements, mostly swimming pools, and the tech, after some tweaking and some learning, uh, ended up returning more than twenty thousand instances of swimming pools throughout France, and that represents about ten million euros worth of untaxed property. So on the one hand, boo for more surveillance, I'm never a fan of that. But on the other, boo for tax evasion. I mean, tax evasion is not a good thing either. Though you could argue that the tax law in the first place is already dumb or unfair and should be changed, and I could be persuaded to see validity in that argument, but yeah, it's hard for me to side with folks who are actively attempting to avoid paying taxes. Our next story takes us to Surrey, a region in the UK that's southwest of Greater London. There, residents are complaining that police are misusing the Ways navigation app Ways allows users to indicate spots where drivers should use extra care, such as areas where they're is an accident or traffic congestion, or you know, where there's a member of the fuzz lying in wait in a speed trap. So drivers using Ways can set up a little icon to indicate that there are coppers up ahead waiting to catch speed demons, and thus when drivers see that icon, they slow down. Now. The complaint is that the Surrey police have been activating this feature as they drive around on patrol, so they're indicating that there's a speed trap when in reality there isn't one. And the feature is meant to indicate, you know, the speed trap, which is a stationary thing, right, Like that's where a cop is lying in wait, just ready to pull over someone for going over the speed limit. But in this case, the cops are in cars that are on the move, so they're actually in motion. However, the icon will stay wherever they set it up, because the icon is thought to be like, well, this is an indication the stationary police unit. So drivers are going to see these icons for speed traps and they slow down, but there's no actual cop there. They were tricked into slowing down and obeying the law. It's unfair that has drivers mad. How dare the police misused tech that is meant to allow speeding drivers to avoid detection. The police have said, look, when we use the app, we were at that location. It's just that we happen to move immediately afterwards. And besides, we cannot be everywhere, and this does cut down on people driving beyond the speed limit. So, like the story about France, this is one where people who want to break the rules are exasperated when the government agency figures out how to leverage technology that makes it harder to do that. And again, it's kind of hard for me to feel sympathy towards the drivers here, largely because speeding often contributes to car accidents and moreover, uh two car accidents that result in terrible injury and fatality. So I don't feel terribly bad for the drivers who were tricked into obeying the law. That just doesn't strike me as something I should be mad about. Um, I think it's kind of amusing. Have you ever played the board game Monopoly and encountered the community chess card that reads bank error in your favor? Well, in Monopoly, if you get that card, you net a cool two hundred bucks. Well, inject that with steroids and you have what happened to a Crypto dot com customer not too long ago. The customer was asking for a sixty eight dollar refund, but Crypto dot Com made a teen sy weed see little mistake and accidentally gave her seven point to million dollars, And then no one at Crypto noticed. For like half a year. I mean, can you imagine seeing a seven million dollar plus amount hit your account. Well, Crypto is now going after this customer in court, demanding that she payback not just the seven point two million smack aous, but interest on top of that. Yikes. At the Colorado State Fair, a digital painting titled Tatra Dopora spatial which I know I butchered the French pronunciation, but whatever, it took home the Blue Ribbon first prize in the digital category, and a subsequent revelation sparked massive controversy because see the credited artist, Jason Allen, revealed that he had used an AI program called mid Journey to generate this image after giving it a specific prompt that he hasn't revealed. Then he fed this resulting image into Gigga pixel AI in order to upscale them before printing the finished work on a canvas and submitting it for a consideration. In other words, this work of art was primarily machine generated, although Alan argues that without his involvement there would be no image at all, so there's still some human element to it. But this has really ticked off a lot of artists, and some of them are calling this the death of artistry itself. Now I wouldn't go that far, but it does raise a ton of ethical questions, right, I mean, if we're to celebrate human artistic achievement, then we need the assurances that a work has come from you know, a human. I think that is hard to argue against, but we also have to acknowledge it is an amazing feat to have reached a point where an AI program can generate a work of digital art and a level of sophistication and beauty that can be award winning when placed up against human competitors. Like that is a phenomenal thing too, I think if it's similar to the way of it being amazing once we reached a point where we could does I a chess playing program capable of beating a human chess master? However, there are social questions to consider. Could machines ultimately displace creatives in creative jobs? Is the benefit to the general public not great enough to potentially justify wiping out creative professionals, you know? And what the heck will creative professionals? What will artists do if that happens? I mean, you could argue get a real job, I guess, But that is absolutely inhumane and cruel. I mean that's like saying, hey, this method of expression that's critical to you and that lets you earn a living doing what feeds your soul. Yeah, you don't get to do that anymore. Go get a job at a desk. Yeah no, thanks. So, yeah, this is a complicated thing. Now. Of course, keep in mind I say that as a content creator, right, So clearly I have a vested interest in this kind of thing. So I admit I have a very strong bias when it comes to this story because I've got stake in this as well. But ultimately, the argument is we shouldn't reward this process where we're displacing people from work, especially when there's nothing underneath too protect like there's no safety net for people, and that this ultimately could apply to any kind of job, right that this is the fear of automation replacing humans, and currently the focus in the industry is to augment human achievement, not to replace it. But there's still this underlying fear that automatic systems, machine learning, artificial intelligence are ultimately going to displace us. But then you follow that up with the question, well, if it did, that becomes an unsupportable system, right, because if no one has a job, no one has money to buy the stuff that's being made, and then the companies that have created all the automated systems in the first place no longer have customers, and the whole thing comes tumbling down in itself. So clearly we have to come up with a solution that addresses this, whether it's moving away from AI and automation, which seems unlikely, or coming up with an alternative to the old model of do this work and we will give you money, which allows you to eat and clothe yourself, etcetera. But that's a whole discussion for another episode. Finally, Dungeons and Dragons recently released a new spell Jammer expansion to D and D. The original spell Jammer rules came out, I believe way back in second edition days, because I owned the original box set back then and I never went beyond second edition rules when I was playing D and D regularly. Now, the rules allow players two board magical ships that ascend into the heavens and allow characters to traverse space or the ether itself to visit New World's new planes of existence. I've actually heard some fairly harsh criticism about this new generation of spell Jammer rules, but that's not really what I wanted to chat about here. Instead, in an effort to promote the release of the new rules, Wizards of the Coast inserted a twenty sided die a k a. A D twenty into the model of a spell Jammer ship with a little bubble on top of it to keep the D twenty in place, and then attached the ship to a balloon and released it in the California Desert. The company released a video that spans more than two hours where a camera positioned to look right at this model with the D twenty inside of it shows the ascent and it is titled Launching a Dice to Space, and that has at least two errors in that title, at least if you're being super pedantic, because traditionally dice is the plural of die. Now, I will admit, in modern vernacular folks will use the word dice to denote a single die. So I guess I can let that one slide because language does evolve, and if you argue against it, well you're really just being pedantic for no reason. I mean, I still use die to refer to a single dice, But I'm a dying breed, so it still irks me. But the other error is the bit about going to space. You cannot get to space on a balloon. You can get super duper high up in the atmosphere. You can, you know, get way up there, as bomb Gardner showed us. And depending upon whose definition of space you're using, you can argue that you're at the edge of space. You know, there are different definitions for where space begins. But the fact remains that a helium balloon can only rise as long as the balloon is lighter than the air surrounding it, And eventually you get to a point where the air is so thin that the balloon and the air around it are at the same weight, so the balloon can rise no further than that. So really I would argue the D twenty went super duper high up in the air way above the clouds even but space. Nah, it didn't pass that saving throw. That's it for the Tech News for Thursday September one, two thousand twenty two. If you would like to reach out with suggestions for topics for me to cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, you can do that in a couple of ways. One is to download the i heart Radio app. It's free to download. Navigate over to the tech Stuff part of the app. There's a little microphone icon there you can click on that leave a message up to thirty seconds in length. The other way is to reach out to me on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Yeah. Text Stuff is an i heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.