Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. He there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for May second two, thy twenty three and first up. You may have seen some headlines like Godfather of AI quits Google to warn us about artificial intelligence, or something along those lines. The godfather in question is not Don Corleone. It is doctor Jeffrey Hinton. He's been a researcher in AI in general and deep learning in particular for decades, and he says that he quit his job at Google so that he could speak out about his concerns centering around artificial intelligence without having those concerns impact Google directly. He says that generally speaking, Google has behaved in a responsible way with regard to AI research. Now, I'm going to do a full episode about doctor Hinton and his concerns next week, so be on the lookout for that episode. Rather than dive into all those details here, I'll say that when someone who is deeply entrenched in AI research comes forward to talk about the potential dangers of the technology, it's probably a good idea for the rest of us to listen. Personally, I've been concerned, but not quite at the point of being worried about AI for a while now. But I'm also worried about the fact that people tend to overgeneralize when they talk about AI, or they use one aspect of AI to represent the entire field. Maybe, however, it's time for me to crank the threat level up a notch or two in my own brain. We'll talk more about that next week, but we do have a few other AI stories today. We're going to get to those in a second, but spoiler alert, several of them fall into the bad news category. Before we jump into all that, however, I wanted to give an update on the legal crusade some film studios are on in order to defeat evil content pirates, who clearly are the most substantial threat to the entertainment industry's quest to make all the money in the world. Little editorial note, I might be a little bit facetious here. The film studios have sued an Internet service provider formerly called RCN, now known as Astound Broadband, saying that this ISP did nothing to stop its customers from downloading more than thirty different films illegally. As part of the studio's quest for justice, they have applied for subpoena against Reddit. Why well, because the studios had identified a few user handles that had posted in various piracy and intellectual property and ISP related subreddit and the studios wanted names. Gush darn it, They wanted to know who those users were, and they were ready to force Reddit to hand over any data it had about those users. Reddit told the studios to pound sand saying, these people you've identified, most of them aren't even talking about the topic that's relevant to your case, and by any standard, we will not hand over that information. And now a US District court judge has cited with Reddit, saying that the studios cannot force Reddit to violate the First Amendment rights of those users, that the barrier to doing that has not been met. And again the judge said, the identity of those folks really has nothing to do with the studio's actual legal case. As for the case against the former RCN, well that's probably going to be a bit of a tricky path as well. As a platform RCN isn't actually responsible for what its users do, though those protections only extend so far. If a platform is told about illegal activity, then it's supposed to take reasonable action to stop that activity or else potentially lose legal protection in the process. But it's a tricky thing to argue in court, so there's no guarantee that the studios will get the justice they so want. Now, I decide to include the story to illustrate how these protections can be important. That they can shield platforms and users platforms like Reddit or internet service providers from becoming a big old target from a heavy hitting industry like the film industry. And while I love film and I think film commerce is a valid business that has real challenges facing it, I also recognize that media companies in general historically have used disproportionate response to perceive threats to their bottom line, even when the threat ends up being unquantifiable. Next up, the Writer's Guild of America or WGA, is now on strike. The WGA represents writers who work for film and television here in the US, and the strike means that members of the union cannot do any work relating to that. They can take no meetings, they can't pitch story ideas, they aren't allowed to communicate with collaborators about a project as long as the strike is going, all work relating to producing, writing for TV and the films in the US, they it has to stop. The WGA is in negotiations with Hey, those film studios that we were talking about a second ago, and at stake are several elements that relate to tech, which is why I'm covering this story in tech stuff. For one thing, streaming has really changed the economics of media. In the old days, before streaming platforms are really a thing, writers would receive compensation not only in the form of a fee for their work, but they would also receive something called residuals, which are kind of like royalties. So let's say you write an episode of a television show We're just going to make one up. We'll call it Cyborg John and his Amazing Tech stuff, and you get paid for your work. You write a teleplay, it's used, you're paid. Then about a year later, a television channel airs the episode a second time. Well, the station is making money by selling advertising against an episode you wrote, so the channel is profiting off of your work. Thus it stands to reason that you should get a share of that money, so you get some in the form of residuals. If Cyborg John the TV series hits that magic number of episodes that are needed to go into syndication and that number varies depending upon the nature of the show, well that's even better news because it means your episode could be showed again and again, and every time it is you get a little payout. This becomes part of your long term income. It kind of becomes passive income at that point. But streaming really changed things. Streaming doesn't always depend upon advertising for one thing, so residuals become a lot trickier to figure out. How do you determine the value of a view if there's not directly advertising served against that view. It really does become tricky. This means that writers are seeing a hit to their long term compensation as people turn more and more to streaming. Plus, a lot of shows have really slimmed down their pool of writers. They used to have writers' rooms filled with lots of writers, and now you have these sort of micro writer rooms where a couple of writers have to share the whole workload for a full season of shows. So workload is going up and compensation is not. On top of that, there's a fear that shows will start to lean on AI tools to take over part of the writing process, which will push more creatives out of the industry. So the strike is really about the WGA trying to force Hollywood to adjust to the current environment because the old economic model just doesn't work due to the changes in how the business itself works. How long this strike will go on will remain to be seen. Already, it's affecting stuff like late night talk shows, which can't go on without writers, and we're likely to see more effects the longer the strike goes, like possibly next year, some shows will have truncated seasons, they won't have as many episodes because the writers went on strike. Also, there are two other major unions in Hollywood, the Screen Actors Guild American Federation of Television and Radio Artists aka sag AFTRA, and then there's also the Director's Guild of America or DGA. Both of those unions have their own contracts with film studios expiring on June thirtieth. Probably also want to renegotiate, especially with things like streaming being part of the mix, and for Screen Actors Guild AI and Deep fakes are definitely something that I'm sure a lot of people are concerned about. So I feel like the Writer's Guild of America is kind of forging a path that these other two unions are likely to follow, at least in large part. And potentially this could mean we could see all three unions, you know, strike that's like the worst case scenario for consumers, because that would mean that pretty much all activity in Hollywood shuts down period TVs and movies, so it can be a real dry spell until things get hashed out. On the other hand, maybe the writers end up making some progress with the Hollywood studios that then the DGA and SAGAFTRA can build on. We'll just have to wait and see. Now, that bit about AI taking an important part in the creative industry might seem a little premature, but then you just need to look at Bloomberg News and it's interview with IBM's CEO r Vind Krishna, and that will change your mind. Toot sweet. So in that interview, Krishna revealed that IBM plans to put its hiring plan for nearly eight thousand jobs on hold to see if maybe possibly AI could do those jobs instead. I mean, why hire real human beings if the robots can do all the work. I mean, robots don't get sick, they don't go on maternity leave, they don't ask for a raise, robots don't organize into a union and threaten to stop working if their demands for stuff like health care and benefits aren't met. Krishna was talking about jobs that do not face customers, so these would be behind the scenes, in house roles, stuff like HR jobs. So maybe that HR robot will actually listen when someone brings up a concern, or maybe that robot will just be really really efficient at minimizing the potential impact to the business while trying to make the problem go away, not resolve, go away. I am salty today must be because yesterday was May Day. Anyway, Krishna's comments are not likely to make anyone feel better about the fear of AI replacing them, of taking our jobs, because that's exactly what IBM appears to be exploring. And y'all, I am not a doom sayer. I don't believe AI is going to replace us all. For one thing, it's just not practical. If AI did replace us, if AI got all the jobs, well, no one would be able to make a living. And if no one's making a living, then they can't afford to buy stuff. And if you can't afford to buy stuff, these companies can't make any money. They just go out of business because who are their customers. Even businesses that have other businesses as customers, those secondary businesses, they're going to go out of money right because there's no one buying anything. It literally becomes a self defeating strategy in the long run. So it ultimately does matter how much cost you eliminate from your operations if you're also eliminating the ability for people to buy your product or service. Hey, maybe I'm giving companies like IBM too much credit for thinking ahead and considering consequences. Okay, we got a lot more news stories to go today. We're gonna take a quick break. Okay, we're back, and we've got more AI stories. So Samsung is now telling employees to avoid using AI. Specifically, Samsung wants its employees to avoid generative AI tools stuff like chat GPT, which employees had been using to do stuff like you know, alter code, create new code, that kind of thing to help with basic steps along those lines. So why is Samsung saying, hey, don't do that. Well. Last month, Samsung had a couple of embarrassing incidents in which employees had shared company IP on chat GPT and that information subsequently leaked to the general public. So folks were working on stuff like Samsung's own proprietary code and also sharing stuff like meeting notes in an effort to use generative AI to create stuff like reports and presentations, but then that sensitive information got out, and that's not great for Samsung. If I were to create an analogy, I would say, as a Southern fella brought up in the state of Georgia, this would be like if someone from Coca Cola had shared Coke's formula with chat GPT in an effort to brainstorm new co Cola ideas, and then the formula would then leak to the public. That would be disaster. That's kind of what happened to Samsung. So now Samsung is saying that these AI tools aren't secure, and to be fair, they are not, and that employees shouldn't be using them to do work. Now, I think this makes a lot of sense because until companies have their own sequestered generative AI tools, not necessarily created by the company itself, but one that is is only being used by that company. It doesn't have connections to the outside world. It can't send information outside of the organization. Well until that day happens. You have to treat these AI tools as a security flaw. Really, generative AI is highlighting a lot of issues in the way that companies currently do business. We've seen the cloud computing industry grow and evolve and adopt tight security controls in the process as a necessity so that they can continue to do business. If your cloud computing company can't show that your operations are secure on their network, well they're not going to have any customers. So generative AI needs to follow that same pathway. Moving on to Twitter, because Heaven help us if we can get through a news episode without having to talk about it. The reports that brands are still pretty iffy about posting on Twitter or using it as an advertising platform because the transition of the blue check mark from being a verification mark into becoming a paid subscription feature has led to a rise of impostors posing as all sorts of things, including official brands, and with Twitter's moderation team absolutely decimated by rounds of layoffs, and we'll come back to that in a bit too. It is harder and harder for Twitter to respond to violations like that in a timely fashion. Plus, as a fun little bonus news item regarding Twitter blue check marks, some formerly verified Twitter users found out that by changing their bios they could get their check mark back, at least temporarily now. Originally the word was that if you put former blue check in your bio, you put the actual words former blue check part of your bio, your little check mark would return. And sure enough a lot of formally verified users tried this out and it seemed to work. But then later on some folks said this would happen if you just updated your bio in any way, so you didn't have to put those specific words in for it to happen. It would just happen if you made an edit to your bio, and also that this change was temporary. I did not try it out myself, but my buddy Tom Merritt tested the former blue check method, and sure enough he got his check mark back before he deleted the phrase from his bio and went back to being an unchecked shlub like the rest of us. It really shows that Twitter's systems are held together tenuously at this point, and that again is not a surprise, because there's hardly enough folks at the company to keep things running, let alone implement new features. Yesterday, Twitter appeared to have some technical issues, as many users reported that the service had logged them out of the desktop website and then wouldn't let them log in again. So. I know a lot of folks these days access everything via apps, but I'm an old person, so I still go to websites and stuff, including for the rare times when I pop on Twitter. I typically use the desktop Twitter website. Sometimes I use tweet Deck, but either way, I'm using a desktop version. I almost never am on my phone looking at this, but I am on I'm typically looking for the tech stuff feed. So for folks like me, getting logged out and then being prevented from logging back in is kind of akin to being exiled from Twitter, which, come to think of it, doesn't sound like that bad of a fate these days. The Verge reported on this issue and pointed out somewhat snarkily that there was no telling how long it would take for the problem to get fixed, because we really don't know how many folks are even working on those kinds of things at Twitter these days? And any inquiry to Twitter's defunct PR department comes back with the infamous oop emoji. The Verge did hypothesize that maybe this had something to do with Twitter trying to fix that problem of formerly verified people getting their check marks back, but who knows. I will say that today, when I was checking on Twitter, I had no issues, I was not logged out, I was fine. So whatever it was, I assume has been fixed, or at the very least hasn't affected me. Now. I mentioned that Twitter's moderation team has been nearly eliminated as part of the massive cuts Musk has made to the company's staff. That led to a real doozy of a problem. Over the weekend, some Twitter users were posting the Super Mario Brothers movie to Twitter, the new one, the animated film, not the Bob Hoskins film, although someone might have done that too, I don't know, but I'm specifically talking about the movie that's out in theaters. They posted the whole darn movie start to finish, and these tweets stayed up for hours. They gained millions of views. I think the primary one got more than nine million views before it got taken down, and then Twitter finally clamped down on them and even started to suspend accounts as a result of this. Of course, once it goes up somewhere, it can pop up somewhere else. Someone else can do the exact same thing. And I mean, it is understandable that Twitter has now suspended accounts that have been found to do this. But if Twitter failed to act, then those movie studios we've been talking about, they sure would not go easy on Twitter. If Twitter is shown to not respond to stuff like DMCA violations, it can be held responsible for hosting illegal material. Again, platforms enjoy a lot of legal protection, but only if they can show that they're making their own steps to curtail illegal activity. If they are aware of illegal activity and they're not doing anything to stop it, then sometimes those protections can go away. Us for how this happened in the first place, well, part of it is because Musk loosened the restrictions on how long a video that's posted to Twitter is allowed to be so a lot of it also has to do with the fact that the company has virtually no one to watch out for stuff like this. Anymore. So, Yeah, Twitter's idiosyncratic woes continue. Some environmental activist groups have filed lawsuits against the US Federal Aviation Administration, or FAA. This is with regards to SpaceX's test flight of its Starship vehicle. You might remember that Starship launched off the ground successfully last month, but subsequently malfunctioned when the first and second stages failed to separate. This prompted SpaceX to hit the self destruct button. But during the launch, the force from those massive engines, the thirty three engines of the first stage of the Starship that caused a lot of damage. It created craters in the launch pad, It hurled debris, including large heavy debris, all around the area, and that area happens to include some really sensitive wildlife habitats, something that SpaceX has had to contend with since setting up operations in Texas, and the environmental groups are accusing the FAA of failing to put SpaceX through proper environmental reviews before signing off on the test flights of the Starship. As part of this lawsuit, these environmental groups are seeking to force the FAA to revoke its license to SpaceX until a more thorough environmental review can happen in order to prevent further destruction to these habitats. That area is home to several endangered species, some of them critically endangered, and I do think a thorough review is a reasonable request, particularly in the wake of the damage the starship's engines did to the launch area. No one really anticipated it being that bad, not that it was, you know, widespread destruction, but it was enough to cause some concern, and I think a review is probably warranted. It may turn out that everything's fine and still within the parameters of the agreement, which is that's fine too. SpaceX should be able to continue then, but without a review, we just don't really know. Okay, I've got a few more stories to cover before we get into any of that. Let's take one more quick break. We're back. An inquisitive bitcoin enthusiast has used their knowledge of blockchain to identify nearly one thousand digital wallets held by various Russian governmental agencies, including ones like the Foreign Military Intelligence Agency and the Foreign Intelligence Service. The anonymous detective accuses the owners of these digital wallets of using the accounts to finance stuff like hacker groups. So it's an open secret the worst kept secret in tech really that Russia relies on hackers to conduct espionage, sabotage, and infiltration campaigns on various targets. It's entirely possible that official government agencies are using these digital wallets to fund those efforts. A lot of hacker groups lean heavily on digital currency because there's less government regulation and oversight. It's easier to avoid imperial entanglements, as obi Wan would say. Further, this secret sleuth claims to have seized control of at least some of these wallets, which they have backed up by then burning through money like literally destroying digital currency. So that suggests this is not an empty boast because according to Reuters, they destroyed around three hundred thousand dollars worth of bitcoin while making their claims. And that's putting someone else's money where your mouth is, all right, I mean, it's like you mean business if you're just burning three hundred grand in order to get attention. According to Yahoo Finance and the firm ch Analysis, the vigilante has even taken Russian money held in these digital wallets and then funneled that money to Ukrainian aid groups. Ultimately, this does not speak well of Russia's security practices. If they've managed to lose control of all these digital assets. Speaking of Russia, by the end of June, it's going to be just a bit harder to find love in that country, or maybe not love, maybe you know, casual flings. You see, the Match Group has announced that it's going to be shutting down operations in Russia on June thirtieth. The Match Group owns, among other things, Tender, so Russians will soon find themselves unswipeable at least on Tender, and at least while they're in Russia. Why is the Match Group pulling out of Russia, Well, basically, it's because Putin's government does terrible things. So the Match Group said that the importance of human rights was the main reason for closing up shop in Russia. That contributing to an economy that supports the violation of human rights isn't something the brand really wants to be associated with. Bad optics. In other words, lots of other companies have similarly shut down in Russia and pulled out of operations. The country has actually converted at least some of the buildings that were left behind into copycat operations. Meant to fill in the void, so maybe they'll have their own Russian version of Tender. Gizmodo reports that a Microsoft Windows update has created frustrations for some users out there. When it comes to setting a default browser. It's the ideal. You should be able to choose any browser as your default and that's that. But after this update, apparently it has become harder to choose anything other than Microsoft's own browser Edge as the default, and switching to you know, Chrome has presented some users with annoying pop ups that essentially asked the same question over and over again, like are you sure you want this as your default browser? The only way to fix this problem was to roll back the system update. Gizmoto goes further, though, so Google had incorporated a button within the Windows version of Google Chrome. It was in the upper left hand corner of the browser window, and if you clicked on this button, it would let you automatically set Chrome as your default browser. And you wouldn't actually have to go into your computer's system settings in order to make this change. So they were just making it easier for you to select Google Chrome as your default if you wanted to. But that Microsoft Windows update broke this functionality within the browser. So professional users had one huge array of problems. But for your consumers, your average people who are using Google Chrome, the button really just stopped working because Moto found that by changing the name of the Chrome app, the problem went away. So suddenly the button worked again just by changing Google Chrome's name, and that was it. Like they didn't change the code or anything. They just changed the name of the app, and once they did, then this barrier went away. That suggests that Microsoft was perhaps purposefully targeting Chrome itself, because if just a name change fixed that issue, and if other browsers weren't having similar problems, it seems like Microsoft might have been targeting Google Chrome, the most popular browser out there. Google, for its part, ultimately turned off that default browser button, which solve these problems, because of course, Google was getting lots of complaints from people say, hey, I set your browsers my default, but I keep getting hassled by these pop ups. What's up? So they turned the button off. That ended those endless pop ups that were frustrating users. But again it suggests that Microsoft was perhaps trying to make it harder for folks to switch to some other browser. And y'all who were online in the late nineties might think the story sounds really familiar. That's because it's not that much different to the accusations that Netscape made against Microsoft in the early days of the web browser wars. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Finally, this past weekend, the World Wide Web celebrated its thirtieth anniversary of emerging from CERN's ownership to enter the public domain. CERN, which is the same organization that's behind the Large Head Collider, was where Tim Berner's lead developed the basics of what would become the World Wide Web and web browsers using stuff like hyperlinks to connect different documents together, even if those documents lived on different servers. And it was on April thirtieth, nineteen ninety three that CERN made this decision to release the code into the public domain, and they relinquished all intellectual property rights to the code. Now, it still took some time for this web idea to catch on. I was actually in college when this was happening, and I distinctly remember looking at early web browsers in the computer lab in my college library, and I was thinking, good grief, that's slow. Forget that it takes forever for these web pages to load up. I'm just going to stick with FTP and tel net. Why would you even use a web browser? Now? In my defense, there weren't that many web pages out there when I first was exposed to the web. They were incredibly primitive web pages and they didn't really change much. So you would go to one and if you went to the same web page a month later, it would be exactly the same. There was really little reason to go to the same web page twice, in other words, But obviously over time things changed, to put it lightly, and now thirty years later, we can't talk about things like commerce and communication and professional networking and creative efforts. We can't talk about any of that without also including the web as part of that conversation. So happy belated Emancipation Day, world Wide Web. And that's it for this episode, the tech News episode for May sewo twenty twenty three. I hope you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. He there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for May second two, thy twenty three and first up. You may have seen some headlines like Godfather of AI quits Google to warn us about artificial intelligence, or something along those lines. The godfather in question is not Don Corleone. It is doctor Jeffrey Hinton. He's been a researcher in AI in general and deep learning in particular for decades, and he says that he quit his job at Google so that he could speak out about his concerns centering around artificial intelligence without having those concerns impact Google directly. He says that generally speaking, Google has behaved in a responsible way with regard to AI research. Now, I'm going to do a full episode about doctor Hinton and his concerns next week, so be on the lookout for that episode. Rather than dive into all those details here, I'll say that when someone who is deeply entrenched in AI research comes forward to talk about the potential dangers of the technology, it's probably a good idea for the rest of us to listen. Personally, I've been concerned, but not quite at the point of being worried about AI for a while now. But I'm also worried about the fact that people tend to overgeneralize when they talk about AI, or they use one aspect of AI to represent the entire field. Maybe, however, it's time for me to crank the threat level up a notch or two in my own brain. We'll talk more about that next week, but we do have a few other AI stories today. We're going to get to those in a second, but spoiler alert, several of them fall into the bad news category. Before we jump into all that, however, I wanted to give an update on the legal crusade some film studios are on in order to defeat evil content pirates, who clearly are the most substantial threat to the entertainment industry's quest to make all the money in the world. Little editorial note, I might be a little bit facetious here. The film studios have sued an Internet service provider formerly called RCN, now known as Astound Broadband, saying that this ISP did nothing to stop its customers from downloading more than thirty different films illegally. As part of the studio's quest for justice, they have applied for subpoena against Reddit. Why well, because the studios had identified a few user handles that had posted in various piracy and intellectual property and ISP related subreddit and the studios wanted names. Gush darn it, They wanted to know who those users were, and they were ready to force Reddit to hand over any data it had about those users. Reddit told the studios to pound sand saying, these people you've identified, most of them aren't even talking about the topic that's relevant to your case, and by any standard, we will not hand over that information. And now a US District court judge has cited with Reddit, saying that the studios cannot force Reddit to violate the First Amendment rights of those users, that the barrier to doing that has not been met. And again the judge said, the identity of those folks really has nothing to do with the studio's actual legal case. As for the case against the former RCN, well that's probably going to be a bit of a tricky path as well. As a platform RCN isn't actually responsible for what its users do, though those protections only extend so far. If a platform is told about illegal activity, then it's supposed to take reasonable action to stop that activity or else potentially lose legal protection in the process. But it's a tricky thing to argue in court, so there's no guarantee that the studios will get the justice they so want. Now, I decide to include the story to illustrate how these protections can be important. That they can shield platforms and users platforms like Reddit or internet service providers from becoming a big old target from a heavy hitting industry like the film industry. And while I love film and I think film commerce is a valid business that has real challenges facing it, I also recognize that media companies in general historically have used disproportionate response to perceive threats to their bottom line, even when the threat ends up being unquantifiable. Next up, the Writer's Guild of America or WGA, is now on strike. The WGA represents writers who work for film and television here in the US, and the strike means that members of the union cannot do any work relating to that. They can take no meetings, they can't pitch story ideas, they aren't allowed to communicate with collaborators about a project as long as the strike is going, all work relating to producing, writing for TV and the films in the US, they it has to stop. The WGA is in negotiations with Hey, those film studios that we were talking about a second ago, and at stake are several elements that relate to tech, which is why I'm covering this story in tech stuff. For one thing, streaming has really changed the economics of media. In the old days, before streaming platforms are really a thing, writers would receive compensation not only in the form of a fee for their work, but they would also receive something called residuals, which are kind of like royalties. So let's say you write an episode of a television show We're just going to make one up. We'll call it Cyborg John and his Amazing Tech stuff, and you get paid for your work. You write a teleplay, it's used, you're paid. Then about a year later, a television channel airs the episode a second time. Well, the station is making money by selling advertising against an episode you wrote, so the channel is profiting off of your work. Thus it stands to reason that you should get a share of that money, so you get some in the form of residuals. If Cyborg John the TV series hits that magic number of episodes that are needed to go into syndication and that number varies depending upon the nature of the show, well that's even better news because it means your episode could be showed again and again, and every time it is you get a little payout. This becomes part of your long term income. It kind of becomes passive income at that point. But streaming really changed things. Streaming doesn't always depend upon advertising for one thing, so residuals become a lot trickier to figure out. How do you determine the value of a view if there's not directly advertising served against that view. It really does become tricky. This means that writers are seeing a hit to their long term compensation as people turn more and more to streaming. Plus, a lot of shows have really slimmed down their pool of writers. They used to have writers' rooms filled with lots of writers, and now you have these sort of micro writer rooms where a couple of writers have to share the whole workload for a full season of shows. So workload is going up and compensation is not. On top of that, there's a fear that shows will start to lean on AI tools to take over part of the writing process, which will push more creatives out of the industry. So the strike is really about the WGA trying to force Hollywood to adjust to the current environment because the old economic model just doesn't work due to the changes in how the business itself works. How long this strike will go on will remain to be seen. Already, it's affecting stuff like late night talk shows, which can't go on without writers, and we're likely to see more effects the longer the strike goes, like possibly next year, some shows will have truncated seasons, they won't have as many episodes because the writers went on strike. Also, there are two other major unions in Hollywood, the Screen Actors Guild American Federation of Television and Radio Artists aka sag AFTRA, and then there's also the Director's Guild of America or DGA. Both of those unions have their own contracts with film studios expiring on June thirtieth. Probably also want to renegotiate, especially with things like streaming being part of the mix, and for Screen Actors Guild AI and Deep fakes are definitely something that I'm sure a lot of people are concerned about. So I feel like the Writer's Guild of America is kind of forging a path that these other two unions are likely to follow, at least in large part. And potentially this could mean we could see all three unions, you know, strike that's like the worst case scenario for consumers, because that would mean that pretty much all activity in Hollywood shuts down period TVs and movies, so it can be a real dry spell until things get hashed out. On the other hand, maybe the writers end up making some progress with the Hollywood studios that then the DGA and SAGAFTRA can build on. We'll just have to wait and see. Now, that bit about AI taking an important part in the creative industry might seem a little premature, but then you just need to look at Bloomberg News and it's interview with IBM's CEO r Vind Krishna, and that will change your mind. Toot sweet. So in that interview, Krishna revealed that IBM plans to put its hiring plan for nearly eight thousand jobs on hold to see if maybe possibly AI could do those jobs instead. I mean, why hire real human beings if the robots can do all the work. I mean, robots don't get sick, they don't go on maternity leave, they don't ask for a raise, robots don't organize into a union and threaten to stop working if their demands for stuff like health care and benefits aren't met. Krishna was talking about jobs that do not face customers, so these would be behind the scenes, in house roles, stuff like HR jobs. So maybe that HR robot will actually listen when someone brings up a concern, or maybe that robot will just be really really efficient at minimizing the potential impact to the business while trying to make the problem go away, not resolve, go away. I am salty today must be because yesterday was May Day. Anyway, Krishna's comments are not likely to make anyone feel better about the fear of AI replacing them, of taking our jobs, because that's exactly what IBM appears to be exploring. And y'all, I am not a doom sayer. I don't believe AI is going to replace us all. For one thing, it's just not practical. If AI did replace us, if AI got all the jobs, well, no one would be able to make a living. And if no one's making a living, then they can't afford to buy stuff. And if you can't afford to buy stuff, these companies can't make any money. They just go out of business because who are their customers. Even businesses that have other businesses as customers, those secondary businesses, they're going to go out of money right because there's no one buying anything. It literally becomes a self defeating strategy in the long run. So it ultimately does matter how much cost you eliminate from your operations if you're also eliminating the ability for people to buy your product or service. Hey, maybe I'm giving companies like IBM too much credit for thinking ahead and considering consequences. Okay, we got a lot more news stories to go today. We're gonna take a quick break. Okay, we're back, and we've got more AI stories. So Samsung is now telling employees to avoid using AI. Specifically, Samsung wants its employees to avoid generative AI tools stuff like chat GPT, which employees had been using to do stuff like you know, alter code, create new code, that kind of thing to help with basic steps along those lines. So why is Samsung saying, hey, don't do that. Well. Last month, Samsung had a couple of embarrassing incidents in which employees had shared company IP on chat GPT and that information subsequently leaked to the general public. So folks were working on stuff like Samsung's own proprietary code and also sharing stuff like meeting notes in an effort to use generative AI to create stuff like reports and presentations, but then that sensitive information got out, and that's not great for Samsung. If I were to create an analogy, I would say, as a Southern fella brought up in the state of Georgia, this would be like if someone from Coca Cola had shared Coke's formula with chat GPT in an effort to brainstorm new co Cola ideas, and then the formula would then leak to the public. That would be disaster. That's kind of what happened to Samsung. So now Samsung is saying that these AI tools aren't secure, and to be fair, they are not, and that employees shouldn't be using them to do work. Now, I think this makes a lot of sense because until companies have their own sequestered generative AI tools, not necessarily created by the company itself, but one that is is only being used by that company. It doesn't have connections to the outside world. It can't send information outside of the organization. Well until that day happens. You have to treat these AI tools as a security flaw. Really, generative AI is highlighting a lot of issues in the way that companies currently do business. We've seen the cloud computing industry grow and evolve and adopt tight security controls in the process as a necessity so that they can continue to do business. If your cloud computing company can't show that your operations are secure on their network, well they're not going to have any customers. So generative AI needs to follow that same pathway. Moving on to Twitter, because Heaven help us if we can get through a news episode without having to talk about it. The reports that brands are still pretty iffy about posting on Twitter or using it as an advertising platform because the transition of the blue check mark from being a verification mark into becoming a paid subscription feature has led to a rise of impostors posing as all sorts of things, including official brands, and with Twitter's moderation team absolutely decimated by rounds of layoffs, and we'll come back to that in a bit too. It is harder and harder for Twitter to respond to violations like that in a timely fashion. Plus, as a fun little bonus news item regarding Twitter blue check marks, some formerly verified Twitter users found out that by changing their bios they could get their check mark back, at least temporarily now. Originally the word was that if you put former blue check in your bio, you put the actual words former blue check part of your bio, your little check mark would return. And sure enough a lot of formally verified users tried this out and it seemed to work. But then later on some folks said this would happen if you just updated your bio in any way, so you didn't have to put those specific words in for it to happen. It would just happen if you made an edit to your bio, and also that this change was temporary. I did not try it out myself, but my buddy Tom Merritt tested the former blue check method, and sure enough he got his check mark back before he deleted the phrase from his bio and went back to being an unchecked shlub like the rest of us. It really shows that Twitter's systems are held together tenuously at this point, and that again is not a surprise, because there's hardly enough folks at the company to keep things running, let alone implement new features. Yesterday, Twitter appeared to have some technical issues, as many users reported that the service had logged them out of the desktop website and then wouldn't let them log in again. So. I know a lot of folks these days access everything via apps, but I'm an old person, so I still go to websites and stuff, including for the rare times when I pop on Twitter. I typically use the desktop Twitter website. Sometimes I use tweet Deck, but either way, I'm using a desktop version. I almost never am on my phone looking at this, but I am on I'm typically looking for the tech stuff feed. So for folks like me, getting logged out and then being prevented from logging back in is kind of akin to being exiled from Twitter, which, come to think of it, doesn't sound like that bad of a fate these days. The Verge reported on this issue and pointed out somewhat snarkily that there was no telling how long it would take for the problem to get fixed, because we really don't know how many folks are even working on those kinds of things at Twitter these days? And any inquiry to Twitter's defunct PR department comes back with the infamous oop emoji. The Verge did hypothesize that maybe this had something to do with Twitter trying to fix that problem of formerly verified people getting their check marks back, but who knows. I will say that today, when I was checking on Twitter, I had no issues, I was not logged out, I was fine. So whatever it was, I assume has been fixed, or at the very least hasn't affected me. Now. I mentioned that Twitter's moderation team has been nearly eliminated as part of the massive cuts Musk has made to the company's staff. That led to a real doozy of a problem. Over the weekend, some Twitter users were posting the Super Mario Brothers movie to Twitter, the new one, the animated film, not the Bob Hoskins film, although someone might have done that too, I don't know, but I'm specifically talking about the movie that's out in theaters. They posted the whole darn movie start to finish, and these tweets stayed up for hours. They gained millions of views. I think the primary one got more than nine million views before it got taken down, and then Twitter finally clamped down on them and even started to suspend accounts as a result of this. Of course, once it goes up somewhere, it can pop up somewhere else. Someone else can do the exact same thing. And I mean, it is understandable that Twitter has now suspended accounts that have been found to do this. But if Twitter failed to act, then those movie studios we've been talking about, they sure would not go easy on Twitter. If Twitter is shown to not respond to stuff like DMCA violations, it can be held responsible for hosting illegal material. Again, platforms enjoy a lot of legal protection, but only if they can show that they're making their own steps to curtail illegal activity. If they are aware of illegal activity and they're not doing anything to stop it, then sometimes those protections can go away. Us for how this happened in the first place, well, part of it is because Musk loosened the restrictions on how long a video that's posted to Twitter is allowed to be so a lot of it also has to do with the fact that the company has virtually no one to watch out for stuff like this. Anymore. So, Yeah, Twitter's idiosyncratic woes continue. Some environmental activist groups have filed lawsuits against the US Federal Aviation Administration, or FAA. This is with regards to SpaceX's test flight of its Starship vehicle. You might remember that Starship launched off the ground successfully last month, but subsequently malfunctioned when the first and second stages failed to separate. This prompted SpaceX to hit the self destruct button. But during the launch, the force from those massive engines, the thirty three engines of the first stage of the Starship that caused a lot of damage. It created craters in the launch pad, It hurled debris, including large heavy debris, all around the area, and that area happens to include some really sensitive wildlife habitats, something that SpaceX has had to contend with since setting up operations in Texas, and the environmental groups are accusing the FAA of failing to put SpaceX through proper environmental reviews before signing off on the test flights of the Starship. As part of this lawsuit, these environmental groups are seeking to force the FAA to revoke its license to SpaceX until a more thorough environmental review can happen in order to prevent further destruction to these habitats. That area is home to several endangered species, some of them critically endangered, and I do think a thorough review is a reasonable request, particularly in the wake of the damage the starship's engines did to the launch area. No one really anticipated it being that bad, not that it was, you know, widespread destruction, but it was enough to cause some concern, and I think a review is probably warranted. It may turn out that everything's fine and still within the parameters of the agreement, which is that's fine too. SpaceX should be able to continue then, but without a review, we just don't really know. Okay, I've got a few more stories to cover before we get into any of that. Let's take one more quick break. We're back. An inquisitive bitcoin enthusiast has used their knowledge of blockchain to identify nearly one thousand digital wallets held by various Russian governmental agencies, including ones like the Foreign Military Intelligence Agency and the Foreign Intelligence Service. The anonymous detective accuses the owners of these digital wallets of using the accounts to finance stuff like hacker groups. So it's an open secret the worst kept secret in tech really that Russia relies on hackers to conduct espionage, sabotage, and infiltration campaigns on various targets. It's entirely possible that official government agencies are using these digital wallets to fund those efforts. A lot of hacker groups lean heavily on digital currency because there's less government regulation and oversight. It's easier to avoid imperial entanglements, as obi Wan would say. Further, this secret sleuth claims to have seized control of at least some of these wallets, which they have backed up by then burning through money like literally destroying digital currency. So that suggests this is not an empty boast because according to Reuters, they destroyed around three hundred thousand dollars worth of bitcoin while making their claims. And that's putting someone else's money where your mouth is, all right, I mean, it's like you mean business if you're just burning three hundred grand in order to get attention. According to Yahoo Finance and the firm ch Analysis, the vigilante has even taken Russian money held in these digital wallets and then funneled that money to Ukrainian aid groups. Ultimately, this does not speak well of Russia's security practices. If they've managed to lose control of all these digital assets. Speaking of Russia, by the end of June, it's going to be just a bit harder to find love in that country, or maybe not love, maybe you know, casual flings. You see, the Match Group has announced that it's going to be shutting down operations in Russia on June thirtieth. The Match Group owns, among other things, Tender, so Russians will soon find themselves unswipeable at least on Tender, and at least while they're in Russia. Why is the Match Group pulling out of Russia, Well, basically, it's because Putin's government does terrible things. So the Match Group said that the importance of human rights was the main reason for closing up shop in Russia. That contributing to an economy that supports the violation of human rights isn't something the brand really wants to be associated with. Bad optics. In other words, lots of other companies have similarly shut down in Russia and pulled out of operations. The country has actually converted at least some of the buildings that were left behind into copycat operations. Meant to fill in the void, so maybe they'll have their own Russian version of Tender. Gizmodo reports that a Microsoft Windows update has created frustrations for some users out there. When it comes to setting a default browser. It's the ideal. You should be able to choose any browser as your default and that's that. But after this update, apparently it has become harder to choose anything other than Microsoft's own browser Edge as the default, and switching to you know, Chrome has presented some users with annoying pop ups that essentially asked the same question over and over again, like are you sure you want this as your default browser? The only way to fix this problem was to roll back the system update. Gizmoto goes further, though, so Google had incorporated a button within the Windows version of Google Chrome. It was in the upper left hand corner of the browser window, and if you clicked on this button, it would let you automatically set Chrome as your default browser. And you wouldn't actually have to go into your computer's system settings in order to make this change. So they were just making it easier for you to select Google Chrome as your default if you wanted to. But that Microsoft Windows update broke this functionality within the browser. So professional users had one huge array of problems. But for your consumers, your average people who are using Google Chrome, the button really just stopped working because Moto found that by changing the name of the Chrome app, the problem went away. So suddenly the button worked again just by changing Google Chrome's name, and that was it. Like they didn't change the code or anything. They just changed the name of the app, and once they did, then this barrier went away. That suggests that Microsoft was perhaps purposefully targeting Chrome itself, because if just a name change fixed that issue, and if other browsers weren't having similar problems, it seems like Microsoft might have been targeting Google Chrome, the most popular browser out there. Google, for its part, ultimately turned off that default browser button, which solve these problems, because of course, Google was getting lots of complaints from people say, hey, I set your browsers my default, but I keep getting hassled by these pop ups. What's up? So they turned the button off. That ended those endless pop ups that were frustrating users. But again it suggests that Microsoft was perhaps trying to make it harder for folks to switch to some other browser. And y'all who were online in the late nineties might think the story sounds really familiar. That's because it's not that much different to the accusations that Netscape made against Microsoft in the early days of the web browser wars. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Finally, this past weekend, the World Wide Web celebrated its thirtieth anniversary of emerging from CERN's ownership to enter the public domain. CERN, which is the same organization that's behind the Large Head Collider, was where Tim Berner's lead developed the basics of what would become the World Wide Web and web browsers using stuff like hyperlinks to connect different documents together, even if those documents lived on different servers. And it was on April thirtieth, nineteen ninety three that CERN made this decision to release the code into the public domain, and they relinquished all intellectual property rights to the code. Now, it still took some time for this web idea to catch on. I was actually in college when this was happening, and I distinctly remember looking at early web browsers in the computer lab in my college library, and I was thinking, good grief, that's slow. Forget that it takes forever for these web pages to load up. I'm just going to stick with FTP and tel net. Why would you even use a web browser? Now? In my defense, there weren't that many web pages out there when I first was exposed to the web. They were incredibly primitive web pages and they didn't really change much. So you would go to one and if you went to the same web page a month later, it would be exactly the same. There was really little reason to go to the same web page twice, in other words, But obviously over time things changed, to put it lightly, and now thirty years later, we can't talk about things like commerce and communication and professional networking and creative efforts. We can't talk about any of that without also including the web as part of that conversation. So happy belated Emancipation Day, world Wide Web. And that's it for this episode, the tech News episode for May sewo twenty twenty three. I hope you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.