Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. He there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio. And how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for Thursday, June two thousand, twin D two. Let's get to it now. Here in the United States, one of the big big stories is that the Supreme Court has overturned the historic decision in Roe versus Wade, which guaranteed the legal protection for a woman to choose to have an abortion. To get into all of this would go well beyond the scope of this podcast, but the ramifications of that decision have spilled over into the tech community in numerous ways. For example, there are a lot of apps designed to help women keep track of their periods, and women in many states have been deleting those apps from their devices, and some political leaders are calling on rules that would grant protections regarding the privacy of personal data for people who use these kinds of apps. The fear is that a woman who's using that kind of an app in a state that has outlawed abortion could be put in a position in which accords subpoenas the app creator to get access to that woman's private medical information in a case brought against her, which is a truly disturbing thought and unfortunately as it's a possible realistic scenario. And so we're seeing this exodus from apps like that and a movement in liberal political circles to bolster privacy protection. Those privacy protections are long overdue, they span so much, especially for medical privacy. These are protections that we've need did for ages. We're just now starting to see some serious movement because of this crisis. Now, one way companies, including those in big tech, have responded to the Supreme Court's decision is to offer to offset or cover the cost of travel for employees who need to go out of state in order to get medical services like an abortion. And that's because several states in the US have already ruled abortions to be illegal or they're in the process of doing so, and a few states, like Texas, have proposed making it illegal to even go outside the state to seek an abortion, which crosses into some very tricky legal territory because there's a question about whether a state can legislate on things that happen outside of that state. Those sorts of rules, by the way, are a big reason why women are dumping those period tracking apps. They don't want to uh to provide evidence that could be used against them in a legal case in one of these states. Anyway, and Gadget reports that Big Text offer to help support employees really falls short because for a lot of these companies, only a small percentage of the folks who work for the company are actually designated as employees. Many of these companies rely heavily on contract workers, and they are not classified as company employees, and therefore they are not covered by these sorts of policies. When you look at companies like Uber and Left, this is particularly extreme. These companies have fought very hard in courts to avoid having to classify drivers as employees. They have insisted that drivers are instead independent contractors, and as such those employees would not be eligible for the benefit of having travel expenses covered by the company. This issue extends beyond the tech industry, but tech is particularly prone to it. Ours Technical reports that Facebook and Instagram have been removing posts about abortion pills well individual states might make abortion illegal. These pills are still legal by federal law. They've been deemed safe by the Food and Drug Administration. As such, women will still have the option to order those kinds of pills through the mail, even if they happen to live in a state that has outlawed abortion. But people who are posting this kind of information on Facebook and Instagram have seen their posts deleted, and in a few cases the people have received a ban from posting on the platforms, typically a band that lasts twenty four hours. Now, it appears that the issue relates to Facebook's policy regarding pharmaceutical drugs. Namely, it is against Facebook's policy to offer, to sell, or to give away pharmaceutical drugs, so those sorts of posts will get removed. And that makes sense, right. I mean, if I had a prescription bottle that was filled with say, oxycotton, I shouldn't be allowed to post on Facebook. Hey I've got these opiates? Who wants one? That would be irresponsible. However, outlets like The Associate to Press and Vice have experimented with various kinds of posts about these abortion pills, and they found that a lot of them would be removed, even if the posts weren't offering drugs but were rather worded to inform people about accessibility. So, in other words, it's not against Facebook's policy to say, if you need access to this drug, here is where you can legally procure it, right like, this is the type of drug you need to ask for, here are the places where you can order it. That should be fine, And yet the investigations discovered that the posts were frequently being removed. Further, ap tested the policy by posting something similar about different uh controlled substances and objects, you know, stuff like guns in marijuana. Facebook has a policy against posting giving away or selling those as well, so there's a restriction there, and so a p would post some stuff wor did very similar lead to the way that it had worded some of the abortion pill posts. And they noticed that these other posts, the ones about marijuana, our guns or whatever, they would stay up, whereas the abortion pills posts were often removed within minutes of being posted, which suggests that Meta is taking a more aggressive approach with abortion pills than it is with anything else. Ours Technica also points out the Meta is one of the tech companies offering to cover travel costs for employees who need to travel to seek an abortion. However, Meta also restricts employees from discussing abortion openly in the workplace, and that creates this kind of situation where employees aren't sure how they can actually get the clearance they need and get the coverage they need if they are also forbidden from talking about it in in the workplace, it definitely complicates matters. Meanwhile, over at TikTok, a lot of users are creating videos that usked the decision to overrule the Row versus Weide decision. Uh. Some of those protests go beyond what TikTok allows, however, as many videos that include or claim to include personal information about the conservative judges who voted to overrule the case have been proliferating across the app. TikTok has been taking down such videos because, I mean, it violates the policy. You aren't supposed to docks people, but those kind of things are popping up faster than the platform can respond. The personal information includes home addresses, uh, though those addresses are also the same as ones that are publicly available, so you could argue these videos aren't revealing personal information, they're just spotlighting information that you could already find elsewhere. But other videos claimed to show stuff like credit card numbers for cards that belonged to the justices. Uh. The justices are finding themselves docks across TikTok, which I'm gonna guess is something most of them can't really get their heads wrapped around, because, let's face it, they're old. The not a judgment I'm younger than the justices, although Amy Coney Barrett is just three years older than I am. But I sometimes have my trouble getting my noodle wrapped around TikTok. In fact, most days I have trouble getting my noodle wrapped around TikTok. So I wouldn't blame the justices if they were a little clueless about that themselves. Brendan Carr, a commissioner with the FCC, recently sent a letter to Apple and Google demanding that they remove TikTok from their respective app stores. Now, this is not related to the Supreme Court dock Sing situation. Rather, this goes back to a concern that the US government has had about TikTok for a few years, namely the possibility that TikTok is really a data gathering service for the Chinese government see TikTok's parent company is a Chinese corporation called byte Dance, and for years, the suspicion was that byte Dance was siphoning off personal information from TikTok users, particularly in the United States, in an effort to spy on US citizens, and developed various strategies such as how to conduct misinformation campaigns and we're gonna come back to misinformation a little bit later in this episode, anyway, BuzzFeed News reported that some leaked recorded audio from an internal TikTok meeting indicated that Chinese based employees have been regularly accessing US users private information, and that does sound creepy. In fact, it's creepy no matter who is doing the snooping. TikTok recently announced it had migrated operations to servers and Oracles infrastructure, implying that the service now has sort of a built in gap between its operations and the Chinese parent company. But Car argues that TikTok is nothing more than a surveillance operation in the guise of a video sharing platform. It's notable, then, no other FCC commissioners signed their name to cars letter, so it's just Car alone. But um, that's the case, and CAR has given the companies until July eight to respond, So I'm sure we'll follow up on this story later. Well, we've got a few more stories to go, but before we get to those, let's take a quick break. The web browser Firefox, which arguably has the best reputation for protecting privacy, at least among the major web browsers, has added a new optional feature to help with privacy. It strips away u r L query parameters. And you might think, well, what the heck is that. Well, if you've ever hovered your cursor over a link and you notice that the associated u r L looks a little strange because there's this weird string of characters in there. There might be an equal sign, and like it just seems like it's a lot of stuff in addition to the actual u r L you are trying to visit. Well, often that string is really a way of tracking users who click on those u r l s. It's kind of like cookies and that it's a method of keeping track of user behaviors, And of course that's really valuable information. For one thing, it can help companies like Meta sell targeted ads. Uh, but user behavior is really the currency of the Internet. So this option in Firefox now strips out those U r L tracking strings, so you just go to the link without leaving behind those kind of footprints. The feature is part of the Enhanced Tracking Protection option in Firefox, which you can access by going to Settings, then Privacy and Security and changing the Enhanced Tracking Protection to the strict setting. Over in the United Arab Emirates, Amazon has bowed to governmental pressure to remove listings for lgbt Q plus related products, including media and rainbow flags Amazon. The company says it's committed to supporting diversity and inclusion, but that the company also must adhere to local laws. In the UAE, anything other than heterosexuality is illy goal, and so Amazon has capitulated to the government's demands that anything remotely suggesting that it's okay to be anything other than straight must be eradicated. What a way to close out pride month Amazon. The blockchain continues to be a buzzy concept in tech. It's what underpins cryptocurrency, n f t s and the evolving concept of Web three. But a recent report out of the Pentagon says that blockchain technology anal it's cracked up to be, namely that the decentralized nature of blockchain isn't as decentralized as people claim it is. The Pentagon found that frequently a small number of entities can disrupt the blockchain. A security research company called Trail of Bits specifically looked into Bitcoin and ethereum and found that four entities working together could disrupt Bitcoin, and only two entities would be required to do the same with Ethereum. Now, to be clear, this isn't just any four or any two. We're talking about prominent entities in both communities that own a significant bulk of the cryptocurrency. Further, Trail of Bits found that many of the servers connected to these networks are running on outdated software. That software can sometimes contain vulnerabilities, which bring the entire network into risk. Uh. The agency also discovered that various mining pool communities have lackluster or even totally absent security. So essentially, the report brings into question the viability of blockchain technology to handle critical transactions in a way that's trustworthy. The full report is titled Our block Chains, Decentralized, Unintended Centralities and Distributed Ledgers. And one of the big reasons this is important is that a huge selling point of that web three evangelists repeat, is this idea of a decentralized approach to transactions. You know, they've argued that this democratizes the web in a way that's closer to the original version of what the Web could be. So instead of these massive gum and he's like Google and Meta essentially carving out the Internet and owning big chunks of it, it would be distributed across all the users. But according to this report, that's just not necessarily the case. There's still centralization. It's just it's just a different group of names than what we have today. So he could say, it's just you know, it's it's the same song, just different words. I said we would talk more about misinformation in this episode, and here we go. A cybersecurity firm called mandy It Incorporated has accused China of funding misinformation campaigns targeting a Canadian rare earth mining operation. So China currently dominates the rare earth materials market with around eight of the market share, and pretty much all of the advanced electronics we rely upon requires at least some rare earth materials in them, so that's a heck of a lucrative market to dominate Mandy and says that a company called dragon Bridge, known for it's misinformation campaigns, has spearheaded an effort to undermine no pun intended the Canadian company Appia, rare Earth's and uranium corporation. Namely Mandyan says, the dragon Bridge operatives have taken to social media, They've created fake accounts and they've started posting messages that's just Appias operations are hazardous and environmentally destructive. Moreover, Mandian says that the same group did something similar to two other rare earth mining companies, one in Australia and one of the United States, and the tactic is all about stirring up controversy and outrage and then just letting that snowball into a massive issue. So you stir the pot, in other words, and then you let other people take it from there. Dragon Bridge has been involved in other misinformation campaigns that align with Chinese government's goals, such as in two thousand nineteen, when the network spread misinformation about advocates in Hong Kong who are attempting to promote democratic measures. Niantic, the company behind Pokemon Go, recently laid off around ninety employees, saying that the company needs to streamline operations. Pokemon Go has been a gargantuan success, but Niantic so far has been unable to replicate that with its subsequent efforts. The company launched a Harry Potter themed game a few years ago, kind of similar to Pokemon Go, but adoption was so low that Niantic would later just shut it down. Kotaku reports that Niantic has canceled four projects, which included a Transformers themed game, a game called Hamlet that was a collaboration with the theater company Punch Drunk, which, by the way, is a really cool theater company. They work in immersive theatrical experiences. Perhaps their best known one is a project called Sleep No More in New York. And then they also canceled a couple of games that have names that sound to me like they are internal code names, like not the official name of the game. Of those were called Snowball and Blue Sky. I should also mention that very recently Niantic announced a project partnership with the NBA. That's the National Basketball Association for those unfamiliar with that organization. So it's not like everything is shutting down. I mean, this was a really big announcement they made pretty recently. UM My guess is that this has led to a pretty tense situation within Niantic, and I hope that the folks who were affected by the layoffs land on their feet very quickly. There's an ongoing struggle in the United States among companies vying for access for the twelve giga Hurts spectrum of frequencies. SpaceX has filed a complaint with the FCC stating that the Dish network, which offers cellular service as well as satellite television service, that Dish network is moving into five G in a way that is going to negatively impact SpaceX is Starlink customers. Starlink is the satellite internet service that SpaceX launched in some regions. SpaceX reps say that dishes twelve giga hurts five G service is going to disrupt Starlink connectivity and that it would be so severe that quote Starlink customers will experience harmful interference more than seventy seven of the time and total outage of service seventy four percent of the time, rendering Starlink unusable for most Americans end quote. Further, the letter accuses Dish network of intentionally misleading the FCC into believing that the services wouldn't interfere with one another. Dish network reps say that the company is evaluating the claims that SpaceX has made in the filing, and a third party company submitted a report saying that more than Starlink customers should experience no disruption due to interference from five G. It's really hard to sort out all the claims here and to see what is true. On the one hand, you've got Dish and starlink to satellite based services that are competing against each other, which raises questions about allegations and reports. Right like, you have to make sure that the claims are valid and not that this is some attempt to hinder a compare a strategy, or on the flip side, that Dish isn't purposefully misrepresenting data in an effort to get a competitive edge on Starlink. And on the other hand, well, it's totally possible for radio waves to actually cause interference. I mean, that's why we have strict rules about how we can use the electromagnetic spectrum. There are some frequency bands reserve for very specific uses, and it's illegal to operate in those bands otherwise, So this will likely require more testing to see if space X's claims are accurate and if so, what solution the parties might arrive at to ensure that services don't disrupt one another, and yet both companies are allowed to do business. All right, we're gonna have another break, and when we come back, we've got a couple more news stories to close out. Okay, let's finish with a couple of kind of cool stories, or at least I think they're cool. One is that Cambridge University Hospitals and the University of Cambridge are partnering with a US based mixed reality company called gig XR to create virtual simulations of patients with medical emergencies and conditions. And they're starting with respiratory issues, but this could easily branch out and cover lots of different medical emergencies. And it's not unusual for doctors and nurses another medical staff who are going through training to have to do simulated UH emergencies and simulated visits. You know, I have a lot of actor friends who at one time or another took on a gig to be a fake patient to help train medical staff and how to assess and diagnose patients. So they'd be given a list of you know, their their symptoms and conditions, and it was their job to answer questions. So the medical staff would come in and ask as if the person was a real patient, asked them about what they were experiencing, how long you know, family history, that kind of stuff, and the actor's job was to give the facts that they had been uh given so that the medical staff could try and make a determination on what to do next. Now, this partnership is really about using mixed reality so that medical personnel can interact with a virtual patient, which is even better because you can program a virtual patient in a way that is consistent, whereas with actors, some people take the whole acting thing to a level that it probably doesn't need to go to. So this is an augmented reality approach that means that the headsets that medical staff will be wearing, it's actually gonna show them their real surroundings, and the virtual patient will be digitally overlaid on top of their the staff's real worldview, and that gives the trainees the opportunity to practice their skills and knowledge in a realistic but still low stakes environment. Right, So they can you know, practice making real time decisions and how to diagnose and tree patients and then they'll see the results right away, and if they've made the wrong decision, well, no one actually suffers for it. It's a virtual patience and no one's going to uh to suffer any consequences of that, other than the trainee learning that they made the wrong call and they have to figure out, you know, how to fix that make sure that they learn the proper way. Uh So it's not no stakes, but it's definitely lower stakes. You don't have to worry that you know, you made the wrong call and someone got more sick or maybe even died because of it. The application is called Hollow Scenarios, and honestly, I think it's a brilliant application of augmented reality technology. It's one of the ones that I really I really like. It really appeals to me. I like this idea of using technology to aid in the training of people in particularly difficult roles. Rob Manfred is a commissioner with the mL B or Major League Baseball, and he made a recent announcement that is making some waves. He said that the MLB is on track to implement an automated strike zone system by two thousand twenty four. And he didn't go so far as to say this is a certainty, but it definitely appears to be the direction the MLB is going in. And I'm not gonna describe or explain the full game of baseball, t'all. I know a lot of you aren't in the United States. Baseball might not be that familiar a sport, but you probably know that in baseball, you've got one team that's in the field and one team that's at bat and a single batter comes up. A pitcher throws a pitch at the batter, at the batter strike zone, probably not at the batter themselves, hopefully not, and then the batter has to try and hit the ball and advance around the bass. Right, that's the basic idea. Well, there is a thing called a strike zone. UH. This zones borders are determined by the width of home plate which the batter stands at. UH. And the width of home plate does not change batter to batter, Right, It's always going to be the same with the area between the batter's knees and the midpoint of their Torso make the vertical borders of the strike zone. So if a pitch passes through that that area you know, in between the middle of the torso and the knees and within the width of the home plate, that's a strike. It's a strike whether the batter swings or not. So if the batter doesn't swing and the ball goes through but it passes through that zone, it's considered a legitimate pitch and it's a strike against the batter. Three strikes and you're out. If a pitch passes outside that zone and the batter doesn't swing, it's a ball. And if a pitcher throws four balls to a single batter, well, that batter gets to walk to first space and then the next batter comes up to the plate. Now, the problem is we rely on human umpires to decide if a pitch was a strike or a ball. Right batter hasn't swung, so the umpire has to decide was that ball a strike, did it pass through the strike zone or did it pass outside and thus was a ball. The umpire is positioned behind the catcher, who in turn is behind the batter, and the umpire has to make a judgment call, and that can sometimes be tricky, and with the benefit of stuff like cameras, we can often see when these calls are bad, when they're incorrect calls, and an incorrect call can have a massive impact on a game. Like if it's a full count, like there's two strikes and three balls against a batter and the pitcher throws a ball, whether that if that if that pitch is a strike or a ball, that makes all the difference for that at bat. And we've had some recent cases where um, a ball that was thrown outside the strike zone was called as a strike and thus brought an end to a batter's at bat when it shouldn't have. And um, that's that makes people mad. Why there's been a call for this kind of a system to kind of remove human error from this part of the game. Now, these kind of systems have been in place in minor leagues for a bit. Sometimes it's used as a way to consult after a call is made to make sure that it was the right call. So it's almost like instant replay, so that you can make sure that when an umpire calls a strike that in fact it was a strike or else it could be overruled. But the proposed approach that they're talking about for two thousand twenty four. It could involve a system that sends information to the umpire via an earpiece. So in that case, the umpire's job, at least for that part of the game, would be to repeat what the system has determined, rather than to make a call themselves. And personally, I'm all for this approach. You don't have to worry about a robot taking sides in a game, or zoning out and thus missing something important, or blinking at the wrong moment, or just having an issue with perception as long as all the cameras and sensors are in working war that is so I say, bring on our robot pumps. And that's it for this episode of text Stuff the Tech News for Thursday June twenty two. Hope you are all well. If you have any suggestions for future episodes and you requests anything like that, you can send those to me via the I Heart Radio app, which is free to download. You can just navigate over to the tech Stuff part of the app and use the little microphone icon that I'll let you record a voice message up to thirty seconds in length and let me know if you want me to use the audio in an episode and I'll do that. Or of course, you can reach out on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. 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

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. He there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio. And how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for Thursday, June two thousand, twin D two. Let's get to it now. Here in the United States, one of the big big stories is that the Supreme Court has overturned the historic decision in Roe versus Wade, which guaranteed the legal protection for a woman to choose to have an abortion. To get into all of this would go well beyond the scope of this podcast, but the ramifications of that decision have spilled over into the tech community in numerous ways. For example, there are a lot of apps designed to help women keep track of their periods, and women in many states have been deleting those apps from their devices, and some political leaders are calling on rules that would grant protections regarding the privacy of personal data for people who use these kinds of apps. The fear is that a woman who's using that kind of an app in a state that has outlawed abortion could be put in a position in which accords subpoenas the app creator to get access to that woman's private medical information in a case brought against her, which is a truly disturbing thought and unfortunately as it's a possible realistic scenario. And so we're seeing this exodus from apps like that and a movement in liberal political circles to bolster privacy protection. Those privacy protections are long overdue, they span so much, especially for medical privacy. These are protections that we've need did for ages. We're just now starting to see some serious movement because of this crisis. Now, one way companies, including those in big tech, have responded to the Supreme Court's decision is to offer to offset or cover the cost of travel for employees who need to go out of state in order to get medical services like an abortion. And that's because several states in the US have already ruled abortions to be illegal or they're in the process of doing so, and a few states, like Texas, have proposed making it illegal to even go outside the state to seek an abortion, which crosses into some very tricky legal territory because there's a question about whether a state can legislate on things that happen outside of that state. Those sorts of rules, by the way, are a big reason why women are dumping those period tracking apps. They don't want to uh to provide evidence that could be used against them in a legal case in one of these states. Anyway, and Gadget reports that Big Text offer to help support employees really falls short because for a lot of these companies, only a small percentage of the folks who work for the company are actually designated as employees. Many of these companies rely heavily on contract workers, and they are not classified as company employees, and therefore they are not covered by these sorts of policies. When you look at companies like Uber and Left, this is particularly extreme. These companies have fought very hard in courts to avoid having to classify drivers as employees. They have insisted that drivers are instead independent contractors, and as such those employees would not be eligible for the benefit of having travel expenses covered by the company. This issue extends beyond the tech industry, but tech is particularly prone to it. Ours Technical reports that Facebook and Instagram have been removing posts about abortion pills well individual states might make abortion illegal. These pills are still legal by federal law. They've been deemed safe by the Food and Drug Administration. As such, women will still have the option to order those kinds of pills through the mail, even if they happen to live in a state that has outlawed abortion. But people who are posting this kind of information on Facebook and Instagram have seen their posts deleted, and in a few cases the people have received a ban from posting on the platforms, typically a band that lasts twenty four hours. Now, it appears that the issue relates to Facebook's policy regarding pharmaceutical drugs. Namely, it is against Facebook's policy to offer, to sell, or to give away pharmaceutical drugs, so those sorts of posts will get removed. And that makes sense, right. I mean, if I had a prescription bottle that was filled with say, oxycotton, I shouldn't be allowed to post on Facebook. Hey I've got these opiates? Who wants one? That would be irresponsible. However, outlets like The Associate to Press and Vice have experimented with various kinds of posts about these abortion pills, and they found that a lot of them would be removed, even if the posts weren't offering drugs but were rather worded to inform people about accessibility. So, in other words, it's not against Facebook's policy to say, if you need access to this drug, here is where you can legally procure it, right like, this is the type of drug you need to ask for, here are the places where you can order it. That should be fine, And yet the investigations discovered that the posts were frequently being removed. Further, ap tested the policy by posting something similar about different uh controlled substances and objects, you know, stuff like guns in marijuana. Facebook has a policy against posting giving away or selling those as well, so there's a restriction there, and so a p would post some stuff wor did very similar lead to the way that it had worded some of the abortion pill posts. And they noticed that these other posts, the ones about marijuana, our guns or whatever, they would stay up, whereas the abortion pills posts were often removed within minutes of being posted, which suggests that Meta is taking a more aggressive approach with abortion pills than it is with anything else. Ours Technica also points out the Meta is one of the tech companies offering to cover travel costs for employees who need to travel to seek an abortion. However, Meta also restricts employees from discussing abortion openly in the workplace, and that creates this kind of situation where employees aren't sure how they can actually get the clearance they need and get the coverage they need if they are also forbidden from talking about it in in the workplace, it definitely complicates matters. Meanwhile, over at TikTok, a lot of users are creating videos that usked the decision to overrule the Row versus Weide decision. Uh. Some of those protests go beyond what TikTok allows, however, as many videos that include or claim to include personal information about the conservative judges who voted to overrule the case have been proliferating across the app. TikTok has been taking down such videos because, I mean, it violates the policy. You aren't supposed to docks people, but those kind of things are popping up faster than the platform can respond. The personal information includes home addresses, uh, though those addresses are also the same as ones that are publicly available, so you could argue these videos aren't revealing personal information, they're just spotlighting information that you could already find elsewhere. But other videos claimed to show stuff like credit card numbers for cards that belonged to the justices. Uh. The justices are finding themselves docks across TikTok, which I'm gonna guess is something most of them can't really get their heads wrapped around, because, let's face it, they're old. The not a judgment I'm younger than the justices, although Amy Coney Barrett is just three years older than I am. But I sometimes have my trouble getting my noodle wrapped around TikTok. In fact, most days I have trouble getting my noodle wrapped around TikTok. So I wouldn't blame the justices if they were a little clueless about that themselves. Brendan Carr, a commissioner with the FCC, recently sent a letter to Apple and Google demanding that they remove TikTok from their respective app stores. Now, this is not related to the Supreme Court dock Sing situation. Rather, this goes back to a concern that the US government has had about TikTok for a few years, namely the possibility that TikTok is really a data gathering service for the Chinese government see TikTok's parent company is a Chinese corporation called byte Dance, and for years, the suspicion was that byte Dance was siphoning off personal information from TikTok users, particularly in the United States, in an effort to spy on US citizens, and developed various strategies such as how to conduct misinformation campaigns and we're gonna come back to misinformation a little bit later in this episode, anyway, BuzzFeed News reported that some leaked recorded audio from an internal TikTok meeting indicated that Chinese based employees have been regularly accessing US users private information, and that does sound creepy. In fact, it's creepy no matter who is doing the snooping. TikTok recently announced it had migrated operations to servers and Oracles infrastructure, implying that the service now has sort of a built in gap between its operations and the Chinese parent company. But Car argues that TikTok is nothing more than a surveillance operation in the guise of a video sharing platform. It's notable, then, no other FCC commissioners signed their name to cars letter, so it's just Car alone. But um, that's the case, and CAR has given the companies until July eight to respond, So I'm sure we'll follow up on this story later. Well, we've got a few more stories to go, but before we get to those, let's take a quick break. The web browser Firefox, which arguably has the best reputation for protecting privacy, at least among the major web browsers, has added a new optional feature to help with privacy. It strips away u r L query parameters. And you might think, well, what the heck is that. Well, if you've ever hovered your cursor over a link and you notice that the associated u r L looks a little strange because there's this weird string of characters in there. There might be an equal sign, and like it just seems like it's a lot of stuff in addition to the actual u r L you are trying to visit. Well, often that string is really a way of tracking users who click on those u r l s. It's kind of like cookies and that it's a method of keeping track of user behaviors, And of course that's really valuable information. For one thing, it can help companies like Meta sell targeted ads. Uh, but user behavior is really the currency of the Internet. So this option in Firefox now strips out those U r L tracking strings, so you just go to the link without leaving behind those kind of footprints. The feature is part of the Enhanced Tracking Protection option in Firefox, which you can access by going to Settings, then Privacy and Security and changing the Enhanced Tracking Protection to the strict setting. Over in the United Arab Emirates, Amazon has bowed to governmental pressure to remove listings for lgbt Q plus related products, including media and rainbow flags Amazon. The company says it's committed to supporting diversity and inclusion, but that the company also must adhere to local laws. In the UAE, anything other than heterosexuality is illy goal, and so Amazon has capitulated to the government's demands that anything remotely suggesting that it's okay to be anything other than straight must be eradicated. What a way to close out pride month Amazon. The blockchain continues to be a buzzy concept in tech. It's what underpins cryptocurrency, n f t s and the evolving concept of Web three. But a recent report out of the Pentagon says that blockchain technology anal it's cracked up to be, namely that the decentralized nature of blockchain isn't as decentralized as people claim it is. The Pentagon found that frequently a small number of entities can disrupt the blockchain. A security research company called Trail of Bits specifically looked into Bitcoin and ethereum and found that four entities working together could disrupt Bitcoin, and only two entities would be required to do the same with Ethereum. Now, to be clear, this isn't just any four or any two. We're talking about prominent entities in both communities that own a significant bulk of the cryptocurrency. Further, Trail of Bits found that many of the servers connected to these networks are running on outdated software. That software can sometimes contain vulnerabilities, which bring the entire network into risk. Uh. The agency also discovered that various mining pool communities have lackluster or even totally absent security. So essentially, the report brings into question the viability of blockchain technology to handle critical transactions in a way that's trustworthy. The full report is titled Our block Chains, Decentralized, Unintended Centralities and Distributed Ledgers. And one of the big reasons this is important is that a huge selling point of that web three evangelists repeat, is this idea of a decentralized approach to transactions. You know, they've argued that this democratizes the web in a way that's closer to the original version of what the Web could be. So instead of these massive gum and he's like Google and Meta essentially carving out the Internet and owning big chunks of it, it would be distributed across all the users. But according to this report, that's just not necessarily the case. There's still centralization. It's just it's just a different group of names than what we have today. So he could say, it's just you know, it's it's the same song, just different words. I said we would talk more about misinformation in this episode, and here we go. A cybersecurity firm called mandy It Incorporated has accused China of funding misinformation campaigns targeting a Canadian rare earth mining operation. So China currently dominates the rare earth materials market with around eight of the market share, and pretty much all of the advanced electronics we rely upon requires at least some rare earth materials in them, so that's a heck of a lucrative market to dominate Mandy and says that a company called dragon Bridge, known for it's misinformation campaigns, has spearheaded an effort to undermine no pun intended the Canadian company Appia, rare Earth's and uranium corporation. Namely Mandyan says, the dragon Bridge operatives have taken to social media, They've created fake accounts and they've started posting messages that's just Appias operations are hazardous and environmentally destructive. Moreover, Mandian says that the same group did something similar to two other rare earth mining companies, one in Australia and one of the United States, and the tactic is all about stirring up controversy and outrage and then just letting that snowball into a massive issue. So you stir the pot, in other words, and then you let other people take it from there. Dragon Bridge has been involved in other misinformation campaigns that align with Chinese government's goals, such as in two thousand nineteen, when the network spread misinformation about advocates in Hong Kong who are attempting to promote democratic measures. Niantic, the company behind Pokemon Go, recently laid off around ninety employees, saying that the company needs to streamline operations. Pokemon Go has been a gargantuan success, but Niantic so far has been unable to replicate that with its subsequent efforts. The company launched a Harry Potter themed game a few years ago, kind of similar to Pokemon Go, but adoption was so low that Niantic would later just shut it down. Kotaku reports that Niantic has canceled four projects, which included a Transformers themed game, a game called Hamlet that was a collaboration with the theater company Punch Drunk, which, by the way, is a really cool theater company. They work in immersive theatrical experiences. Perhaps their best known one is a project called Sleep No More in New York. And then they also canceled a couple of games that have names that sound to me like they are internal code names, like not the official name of the game. Of those were called Snowball and Blue Sky. I should also mention that very recently Niantic announced a project partnership with the NBA. That's the National Basketball Association for those unfamiliar with that organization. So it's not like everything is shutting down. I mean, this was a really big announcement they made pretty recently. UM My guess is that this has led to a pretty tense situation within Niantic, and I hope that the folks who were affected by the layoffs land on their feet very quickly. There's an ongoing struggle in the United States among companies vying for access for the twelve giga Hurts spectrum of frequencies. SpaceX has filed a complaint with the FCC stating that the Dish network, which offers cellular service as well as satellite television service, that Dish network is moving into five G in a way that is going to negatively impact SpaceX is Starlink customers. Starlink is the satellite internet service that SpaceX launched in some regions. SpaceX reps say that dishes twelve giga hurts five G service is going to disrupt Starlink connectivity and that it would be so severe that quote Starlink customers will experience harmful interference more than seventy seven of the time and total outage of service seventy four percent of the time, rendering Starlink unusable for most Americans end quote. Further, the letter accuses Dish network of intentionally misleading the FCC into believing that the services wouldn't interfere with one another. Dish network reps say that the company is evaluating the claims that SpaceX has made in the filing, and a third party company submitted a report saying that more than Starlink customers should experience no disruption due to interference from five G. It's really hard to sort out all the claims here and to see what is true. On the one hand, you've got Dish and starlink to satellite based services that are competing against each other, which raises questions about allegations and reports. Right like, you have to make sure that the claims are valid and not that this is some attempt to hinder a compare a strategy, or on the flip side, that Dish isn't purposefully misrepresenting data in an effort to get a competitive edge on Starlink. And on the other hand, well, it's totally possible for radio waves to actually cause interference. I mean, that's why we have strict rules about how we can use the electromagnetic spectrum. There are some frequency bands reserve for very specific uses, and it's illegal to operate in those bands otherwise, So this will likely require more testing to see if space X's claims are accurate and if so, what solution the parties might arrive at to ensure that services don't disrupt one another, and yet both companies are allowed to do business. All right, we're gonna have another break, and when we come back, we've got a couple more news stories to close out. Okay, let's finish with a couple of kind of cool stories, or at least I think they're cool. One is that Cambridge University Hospitals and the University of Cambridge are partnering with a US based mixed reality company called gig XR to create virtual simulations of patients with medical emergencies and conditions. And they're starting with respiratory issues, but this could easily branch out and cover lots of different medical emergencies. And it's not unusual for doctors and nurses another medical staff who are going through training to have to do simulated UH emergencies and simulated visits. You know, I have a lot of actor friends who at one time or another took on a gig to be a fake patient to help train medical staff and how to assess and diagnose patients. So they'd be given a list of you know, their their symptoms and conditions, and it was their job to answer questions. So the medical staff would come in and ask as if the person was a real patient, asked them about what they were experiencing, how long you know, family history, that kind of stuff, and the actor's job was to give the facts that they had been uh given so that the medical staff could try and make a determination on what to do next. Now, this partnership is really about using mixed reality so that medical personnel can interact with a virtual patient, which is even better because you can program a virtual patient in a way that is consistent, whereas with actors, some people take the whole acting thing to a level that it probably doesn't need to go to. So this is an augmented reality approach that means that the headsets that medical staff will be wearing, it's actually gonna show them their real surroundings, and the virtual patient will be digitally overlaid on top of their the staff's real worldview, and that gives the trainees the opportunity to practice their skills and knowledge in a realistic but still low stakes environment. Right, So they can you know, practice making real time decisions and how to diagnose and tree patients and then they'll see the results right away, and if they've made the wrong decision, well, no one actually suffers for it. It's a virtual patience and no one's going to uh to suffer any consequences of that, other than the trainee learning that they made the wrong call and they have to figure out, you know, how to fix that make sure that they learn the proper way. Uh So it's not no stakes, but it's definitely lower stakes. You don't have to worry that you know, you made the wrong call and someone got more sick or maybe even died because of it. The application is called Hollow Scenarios, and honestly, I think it's a brilliant application of augmented reality technology. It's one of the ones that I really I really like. It really appeals to me. I like this idea of using technology to aid in the training of people in particularly difficult roles. Rob Manfred is a commissioner with the mL B or Major League Baseball, and he made a recent announcement that is making some waves. He said that the MLB is on track to implement an automated strike zone system by two thousand twenty four. And he didn't go so far as to say this is a certainty, but it definitely appears to be the direction the MLB is going in. And I'm not gonna describe or explain the full game of baseball, t'all. I know a lot of you aren't in the United States. Baseball might not be that familiar a sport, but you probably know that in baseball, you've got one team that's in the field and one team that's at bat and a single batter comes up. A pitcher throws a pitch at the batter, at the batter strike zone, probably not at the batter themselves, hopefully not, and then the batter has to try and hit the ball and advance around the bass. Right, that's the basic idea. Well, there is a thing called a strike zone. UH. This zones borders are determined by the width of home plate which the batter stands at. UH. And the width of home plate does not change batter to batter, Right, It's always going to be the same with the area between the batter's knees and the midpoint of their Torso make the vertical borders of the strike zone. So if a pitch passes through that that area you know, in between the middle of the torso and the knees and within the width of the home plate, that's a strike. It's a strike whether the batter swings or not. So if the batter doesn't swing and the ball goes through but it passes through that zone, it's considered a legitimate pitch and it's a strike against the batter. Three strikes and you're out. If a pitch passes outside that zone and the batter doesn't swing, it's a ball. And if a pitcher throws four balls to a single batter, well, that batter gets to walk to first space and then the next batter comes up to the plate. Now, the problem is we rely on human umpires to decide if a pitch was a strike or a ball. Right batter hasn't swung, so the umpire has to decide was that ball a strike, did it pass through the strike zone or did it pass outside and thus was a ball. The umpire is positioned behind the catcher, who in turn is behind the batter, and the umpire has to make a judgment call, and that can sometimes be tricky, and with the benefit of stuff like cameras, we can often see when these calls are bad, when they're incorrect calls, and an incorrect call can have a massive impact on a game. Like if it's a full count, like there's two strikes and three balls against a batter and the pitcher throws a ball, whether that if that if that pitch is a strike or a ball, that makes all the difference for that at bat. And we've had some recent cases where um, a ball that was thrown outside the strike zone was called as a strike and thus brought an end to a batter's at bat when it shouldn't have. And um, that's that makes people mad. Why there's been a call for this kind of a system to kind of remove human error from this part of the game. Now, these kind of systems have been in place in minor leagues for a bit. Sometimes it's used as a way to consult after a call is made to make sure that it was the right call. So it's almost like instant replay, so that you can make sure that when an umpire calls a strike that in fact it was a strike or else it could be overruled. But the proposed approach that they're talking about for two thousand twenty four. It could involve a system that sends information to the umpire via an earpiece. So in that case, the umpire's job, at least for that part of the game, would be to repeat what the system has determined, rather than to make a call themselves. And personally, I'm all for this approach. You don't have to worry about a robot taking sides in a game, or zoning out and thus missing something important, or blinking at the wrong moment, or just having an issue with perception as long as all the cameras and sensors are in working war that is so I say, bring on our robot pumps. And that's it for this episode of text Stuff the Tech News for Thursday June twenty two. Hope you are all well. If you have any suggestions for future episodes and you requests anything like that, you can send those to me via the I Heart Radio app, which is free to download. You can just navigate over to the tech Stuff part of the app and use the little microphone icon that I'll let you record a voice message up to thirty seconds in length and let me know if you want me to use the audio in an episode and I'll do that. Or of course, you can reach out on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. 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