Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and Welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. How the tech are you. We're gonna start off today's news episode with a little story about digital surveillance. Georgetown Laws Center on Privacy and Technology reports that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency or ICE, has been engaged in widespread digital surveillance despite the fact that the agency isn't supposed to do that now. Essentially, ICE has been using a loophole, so instead of conducting digital surveillance on US residents itself, the agency has actually just been purchasing massive amounts of data through various data brokers and other private companies as well as public utilities. Now, according to the researchers, ICE has accumulated nearly three quarters of all adult residents who have a driver's license in the US three quarters of photos. That is, of those driver's licenses. The agency purchases information from utility companies, and that gives ICE the ability to detect when someone moves by seeing when someone activates service at a new address. ICE is part of the Department of Homeland Security, and the researchers are arguing that the agency lacks proper congressional oversight. The researchers have made a few recommendations to address this incredible amount of digital surveillance, ranging from more thorough oversight of the agency to reforming immigration law. Personally, I think this really points to a need to create comprehensive laws about who can sell data to whom and under what circumstances, because as it stands right now, there's no need to be some sort of skullduggery oriented agency. You don't have to be you know, Mission impossible or anything in order to spy on people. These agencies just purchased the information they need from various sources, and through that they get an incredibly detailed dossier on anyone they like. I mean, our ability to analyze data has reached a point where if you just have the information, you can sift through it and put together a really comprehensive picture of who someone is and where they've been. Big Brother has been distributed and democratized. Yikes. In other news on how US departments are using technology, the Pentagon recently held a demonstration via its Joint Counter Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office. I had to be really careful about reading that. It's kind of a mouthful, But in this demonstrate, Shan vendor teams used high powered microwave transmitters to bring down drones. So the department has been assessing the possibility of using high powered microwave beams to bring down hostile drones. We're talking military grade drones here, not your average little quad copters. And this was the third set of demonstrations, all intended to give the agency the information needed to determine capability gaps like where do they need to make improvements, and to focus on developing the next generation of anti drone weaponry. The vendors had to demonstrate their respective technologies effectiveness, which included everything from threat detection to tracking too bringing down targeted drones, sometimes two at a time. So this is still very much in development, and while similar weapons may already be deployed, what we're really looking at is the refinement process intended to develop more effective anti drone defense systems. There have been a few people who have suggested that Elon Musk's quest to purchase Twitter has had at least something to do with his own tendency to post things that the United States securities and Exchange Commission or SEC, has objected to not that buying Twitter is going to change that at all, but whether that factored into his decision to purchase the company or not. The SEC is once again investigating Musk with relation to Twitter. This time, it's because Musk was late in submitting a form indicating his intent to purchase more than five percent of Twitter's shares. He ended up purchasing a little more than nine percent. That's something that investors are supposed to do when they plan to make that substantial and investment in a company, is to file that with the SEC. Musk apparently filed the form at least ten days after he was supposed to, and, according to the SEC, by not reporting the intended purchase in a timely manner, Musk was able to buy that stock essentially at a discount, potentially amounting to as much as a hundred forty three million dollars. How Well, if Musk had followed the proper protocol and submitted the form properly, that submission would be public information, which means investors would have seen that Musk was going to buy more than nine of Twitter's stocks, and that in turn could have been enough to drive up the share price, which would have increased the wealth of current shareholders or encouraged more people to buy into Twitter stock ahead of that actual purchase. And one shareholder has now filed a lawsuit against Musk, essentially arguing that by filing late, Musk robbed shareholders of potential wealth. The SEC could also seek its own lawsuit against Musk, but neither the shareholder lawsuit or a potential SEC lawsuit would likely have any real impact on the planned acquisition, which still requires shareholder and regulatory approval before it can go through. Let's start talking about Meta. There are a couple of stories to to cover now. The owner of Facebook, that being Meta, is looking to make some cutbacks to its Reality Labs division, which is the hardware centric part of Meta that develops mixed reality hardware. Apparently, at an internal meeting, leaders told employees to expect upcoming changes to be announced within a week or so, with those announcements being specific cutbacks. And this is a pretty dramatic turnaround from where we were in the fall of back. Then that's when Zuckerberg spoke at length about how the company was putting an intense focus on developing all things metaverse. I mean that's when they changed the company name from Facebook to Meta and the development includes making immersive hardware that will give people the chance to experience the metaverse. But you see, this dedicated focus on the metaverse comes at a massive cost. And if you skip ahead a few months to earlier this year, we learned that Facebook had experienced a drop in active users. That news shocked investors, who I guess clutched their pearls whenever certain numbers go down instead of up, and I might be getting increasingly grouchy about how the stock market works. Anyway, there was a drop in confidence from the investor community, and Meta reps said that the company would be cutting costs to reduce the negative impact on shareholders. Subsequently, news broke that the company was slowing down on hiring for mid to senior level positions within the company in general. And now we hear that they're going to be cutbacks that will put some of these reality labs projects on old at least for a while. Some might end up being shelved permanently. We do not yet know which of those projects are going to be impacted. We had previously heard that the division was working on four new headsets to aiming at a more premium space in the market, which really means you know, more features and more expensive, and too meant for a more of an entry level space in the market. Still expensive, but you know less. So not sure if any of those four are going to be impacted by these cutbacks or if this is actually going to affect projects that are further down the pipeline. Meta reps said there are no current plans for employee layoffs at this time, so that's good. I mean, I don't like Meta, but I really hate seeing people lose their jobs. In an earlier tech News episode, I talked about how Facebook relied on third party staffing services to hire content moderators in places like Africa. Now, one former employee is bringing a lawsuit against both Meta and one of those third party companies, a tech outsourcing firm called Sama, which is based out of San Francisco. This former employee argues that he was hired under false pretenses because he says he was never told that he would be working for Facebook and that he would be doing content moderation when he interviewed for the position. He relocated from South Africa to Kenya in order to take this job and then discovered what it was that he was meant to do. His lawsuit claims that this practice is a violation of Kenya's anti human trafficking laws. So the headlines about this all naturally say that Facebook is being sued for engaging in human trafficking. In fact, that's why I clicked on the story to read up on what was going on. Now, I don't know the particulars of this law in question, However, I have to assume the fact at the former employee allegedly had no idea who his employer was going to be or what his actual position was going to be while he relocated to another country has to factor into it. In addition, the former employee claims he was fired after he tried to organize other employees, so there are also charges of union busting wrapped up in this too. Now, on top of all that, the man says that exposure to truly horrifying material, which ranged from child abuse to videos of executions, has left him traumatized and impacted his physical and mental health. Now, y'all, I can tell you I could never be a content moderator on Facebook. Just my exposure to the normal news is enough to cause me mental distress, and that's the same stuff that everybody else is seeing all the time. Anyway, Meta reps have claimed that the company takes employee welfare seriously and holds their third party staffing service is accountable for providing fair pay, benefits and support, something that the lawsuit UH argues with, and SAMA that third party staffing service, for its part, denies that it engaged in any anti union behavior. So I'll have to see where the story goes from here. Okay, we've got some more news stories coming up, but first let's take a quick break. Last year, the state of Texas passed a law called HB twin Team, which would give Texans the right to sue social media platforms that have fifty million or more active monthly users if those users believe that they got a ban from those platforms due to their political views. So, in other words, if they think that they've been banned from a service because of their political views, they can sue the company within the state of Texas, UH if they are residents of Texas. That is, the law also forbids social networks from cutting off access to people in Texas in order to sidestep this issue, which y'all that is absolutely wild. Uh. It's left a lot of folks saying, where does Texas get off litigating how a business in another state conducts itself, Like if the business is incorporated, saying California, why gives Texas the authority to prevent that company from not providing service to Texas? Anyway. A federal judge previously passed an injunction against HB twenty, preventing it from going into effect until further judgment determined whether or not the law is you know, legal, and the Fifth U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals has now overturned that injunction and HB twenty is now in effect in Texas. I suspect this is just another stop on the journey to bringing this law ahead of the Supreme Court. But then, considering the current makeup of the U. S. Supreme Court, I can't confidently say that they will find the law to be unconstitutional, even though it appears to be pretty unconstitutional. The federal judge who passed the injunction had pointed out that passing the law infringed upon the freedom of speech for the actual social media platforms that these platforms have the right to establish codes of conduct and then they have the right to enforce those codes of conduct, and any state coming in to say no, you can't do that is akin to censorship, which you know is ironic because Texas was positioning its law as being anti censorship, but in fact Texas was engaging in censorship against the social platforms in order to do this. Anyway, HB twenty is just a terrible law, full stop. It's a terrible law. On top of that, one of the judges in the the Circuit Court of Appeals referred to Twitter as an Internet provider, which is just playing wrong, Like you can't get more wrong. Twitter provides a service that's on the Internet, but it's not an Internet provider. It's not providing Internet service. I swear Texas is like the upside down in Stranger Things. And I say that as a resident of Georgia, a state that has its own share of totally backwards legislation. Anyway, I can't wait to see where the story goes in the future, and my heart goes out to all the folks in Texas who opposed this kind of stuff. I understand how hard it can be to live in a state where leaders make bad decisions that reflect poorly on you, and you had nothing to do with it. Over in Europe, we're seeing another example of how leaders, in an effort to fight something that's truly hideous, in this case UH images and video of child sexual abuse use, they are pursuing rules that will have massive, unintended consequences and a negative impact. So the EU has proposed founding a new division to fight child abuse material online, as well as required tech companies to quote, detect, report, block and remove end quote such material from their platforms. On the surface, that all sounds fairly you know, reasonable right to detect, report, block, and remove child abuse material. And obviously this material is incredibly harmful and reporting it would be absolutely key in order to track down the people responsible and to stop them from abusing children. But it's the detect part that could be particularly disruptive and dangerous for lots of reasons. You see, for any platform that allows private messaging between people on that platform, if that platform is ordered to dete hecked this kind of material, well, to do that, it would have to scan messages that were being sent between individuals on the platform to see if any of that material was included in those messages. These could be messages that people presumably come on as being private and secure. It would also mean that end to end encryption would be pretty much impossible or rendered meaningless. A solid end to end encryption service would be created in such a way that no one other than the parties communicating would be able to see the contents of that communication. That includes the communications platform itself. So in other words, if company A allows true end to end encryption, company A has no way of knowing what is being sent over those messages. It cannot access those messages, it cannot scan them. So the only way to get around this is to do was called client side scanning. That means you would actually have to scan the material on the end devices once the material has been decrypted. So that would mean all users in the EU would have various companies scanning their personal devices for signs of this kind of material. Apple had actually proposed doing this and then put the plans on hold after receiving some pushback from civil rights activists, and those activists have argued that this kind of surveillance is really dangerous. It removes all privacy. Now, there is no denying that child abuse is horrible and it needs to be stopped and prevented. But researchers are suggesting that it might be better to use other methodologies rather than stripping away the possibility of true d end encryption, which promotes human rights, and that those methodologies can be things like analyzing metadata in order to detect criminal behavior and to stop it. Obviously, this is one of those really emotionally charged topics. It is hard to tackle. There are no easy solutions, and it is very clear that a solution is desperately needed, so it is a difficult situation to kind of suss out. A couple of weeks ago, we talked about how Netflix had a very rough call with investors as the company reported its first net loss and subscribers ever, and once again, you know, if numbers go the wrong way, the stock market goes bananas. Anyway, apart from this being another example of how reactionary things are in the investment world, it pushed Netflix to talk about the ways the company intends to drive up revenue and reduce costs in the future. Two of those ways involved clamping down on the practice of password sharing, and the other was to introduce ads. Two create different tiers of subscriptions now. The company says we might see both of these practices begin by the end of this year, and we have an idea of how this is probably going to play out. For one thing, Netflix has been experimenting with a model in a few countries in which households can pay a little bit extra in their monthly subscriptions and in return, they are authorized to share their password with at least a person outside of their household. So this this allows them for the case where someone who is not living under the same roof is able to access the service, so you pay a little bit more per month and you get a kind of adjunct household member who just happens to live outside the house. As for advertisements, the general belief is that Netflix would do something similar to what we've seen other platforms do in the past, which is that they offer a less expensive subscription model for folks who opt to have ads included in their service, and those who don't want ads will just have to pay a little bit more per month for a premium service. Whether this will address the issue of subscriber loss remains to be seen. Okay, I've got a couple more stories to go through before we get to those, let's take another quick break. One service that did not have Netflix's problems was Disney Plus. The mouse House reported that nearly eight million people joined as new subscribers to Disney Plus over the first quarter of twenty two, which was better than anticipated. This makes Disney Plus a leading company when it comes to growth. Keep in mind, like there are other services that are bigger, they're just not growing at the same rate as Disney Plus growth. Like again, this is why I think growth is a bad metric for success, because you could be growing really fast, but the reason for that might be that you're pretty small. So if you have two people on your service and then six more people sign up, you know that if you if you convert that over to percentages, looks really impressive, but when you look at the actual numbers, maybe not so much. Anyway, despite the fact that Disney Plus is growing very fast, faster than services like Hbo Max, the division is losing lots of money. In fact, it's losing money faster than it was before. This, by the way, is again one of the things that really puzzles me about business. It convinces me that all money is fake and we're all just playing pretend until it all falls apart. But yeah, Disney Plus is growing super fast and pulling in more money per subscriber on average, but it's also losing money faster because the cost of producing exclusive content for the platform is really high. We've seen this with other services as well. Netflix, in particular streaming platforms attracts subscribers primarily by securing exclusive content. Sometimes that is involved by signing deals with specific studios so that you have the exclusive right to stream that studio's content. In other cases, it involves funding productions directly, and this stuff is expensive you. Disney is reportedly considering introducing an ad supported subscription tier to Disney Plus in the future, similar to what Netflix is considering. Yesterday, Google kicked off its annual Io event. That's the one in which the company reveals new products and invites developers to become familiar with various platforms so that those developers can create stuff that can work on those platforms. Like this is where developers learn about increased features and and upcoming operating system updates, that kind of stuff. Now, I've attended one io event that was the year that they brought in Flight of the con Chords to play the after party. But I didn't know who Fly the Concords were at the time, and now I kick myself because if I had known, I would have been at the whole set instead of just at the tail end of it. Anyway, none of that matters. Let's talk about some of the stuff that Google showed off this year. So it teased the Pixel seven. This is going to be the next generation of the Pixel line of smartphones, the Android phones. The company plans to release a Pixel seven and a Pixel seven Pro, which is in line with what it's done over the last couple of years. Both of those phones will sport Google Tensor chips, but that's about all the information that the company was willing to part with at this stage. Google also announced the Pixel six A, which is meant to be a more budget friendly version of the Pixel six smartphone. It'll be slightly smaller, might lack a few other features. Uh, it will retail for four dollars, and one thing that the Pixel six A will not have is a headphone jack. Google has gone back and forth when it comes to including a physical headphone jack, and has even taken some potshots at Apple for having abandoned the headphone Jack in the past, but it looks like Google is doing the same thing, at least with the six A. Maybe that's because of another announcement that the company made, which is that the Pixel Buds Pro Earbuds, a a two dollar set of earbuds with noise cancelation and advanced microphones to allow for calls with a minimum of interference, are coming out this year. At long last, Google also unveiled the Pixel Watch, which will incorporate fitbit technology. That fitbit connection is critical because it means Google can rely upon tried and tested technology rather than developing everything from scratch. The company said it would be available in the fall, and it would be sold at a premium price, which probably means if you have to ask, you can't afford it, So I guess no Pixel Uch for me. Then. Google also showed off a prototype of some smart glasses that would be able to display translations in real time, meaning if you had two people and each of them had a pair of these glasses, they could have a conversation with one another even if neither of them spoke the other person's language, which is pretty cool. Uh, there's no telling if this prototype will ever become an actual product, but it is a nice demonstration of how augmented reality technology could have some real world applications outside of gimmicky stuff. The io event continues today, but usually we see all the big reveals on day one. But if anything huge gets announced today, I'll be sure to cover it in an episode next week. Finally, Bethesda, the video game studio and publisher, tweeted that upcoming video game titles Redfall and Starfield will not be coming out this year. The company has chosen to postpone the publication these games until the first half of three, citing the need to quote ensure that you received the best, most polished versions end quote. Bethesda first announced Starfield at e three way back in calling it a an all new i P, so not a continuation of any of the franchises Bethesda is known for, you know, stuff like Fallout and Skyrim or Elder Scrolls. I should say, and that this game puts players in the role of space explorers. Uh, there's not a whole lot more detail available about Starfield. There's a bit, but you know it's it's largely mysterious since it's a brand new I P. Red Fall is actually an arcane Studios title. Bethesda is the publisher, not the developer in this case, and it's a first person shooter game similar to titles like Left for Dead, in which players can assume one of four playable characters and up to four people can play cooperatively in a session x app. Instead of fighting off zombie hordes like you do and Left for Dead, where you're you know you're fighting off endless waves of zombies on your way to a safe zone, the Red Fall game is going to be about fighting off vampiric hordes as you presumably try to make your way to safety. I'm told there's more to it than that, and I'm being a bit snarky. It's my reaction is mostly based off of a teaser video about Red Fall that I saw a couple of years ago, where I thought, ah, it's Left for Dead, but with vampires. So I'm sure it's more complicated and sophisticated than that. So my apologies. It was just my initial reaction. And that's it for the Tech News for today. That's Thursday May twelve, two thousand twenty two. Hope all of you are well. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, Please leave me a note on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff. Hs W definitely used the the tech show handle because I don't check my own Twitter anymore. And I will talk to you again really soon. Y tech Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and Welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. How the tech are you. We're gonna start off today's news episode with a little story about digital surveillance. Georgetown Laws Center on Privacy and Technology reports that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency or ICE, has been engaged in widespread digital surveillance despite the fact that the agency isn't supposed to do that now. Essentially, ICE has been using a loophole, so instead of conducting digital surveillance on US residents itself, the agency has actually just been purchasing massive amounts of data through various data brokers and other private companies as well as public utilities. Now, according to the researchers, ICE has accumulated nearly three quarters of all adult residents who have a driver's license in the US three quarters of photos. That is, of those driver's licenses. The agency purchases information from utility companies, and that gives ICE the ability to detect when someone moves by seeing when someone activates service at a new address. ICE is part of the Department of Homeland Security, and the researchers are arguing that the agency lacks proper congressional oversight. The researchers have made a few recommendations to address this incredible amount of digital surveillance, ranging from more thorough oversight of the agency to reforming immigration law. Personally, I think this really points to a need to create comprehensive laws about who can sell data to whom and under what circumstances, because as it stands right now, there's no need to be some sort of skullduggery oriented agency. You don't have to be you know, Mission impossible or anything in order to spy on people. These agencies just purchased the information they need from various sources, and through that they get an incredibly detailed dossier on anyone they like. I mean, our ability to analyze data has reached a point where if you just have the information, you can sift through it and put together a really comprehensive picture of who someone is and where they've been. Big Brother has been distributed and democratized. Yikes. In other news on how US departments are using technology, the Pentagon recently held a demonstration via its Joint Counter Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office. I had to be really careful about reading that. It's kind of a mouthful, But in this demonstrate, Shan vendor teams used high powered microwave transmitters to bring down drones. So the department has been assessing the possibility of using high powered microwave beams to bring down hostile drones. We're talking military grade drones here, not your average little quad copters. And this was the third set of demonstrations, all intended to give the agency the information needed to determine capability gaps like where do they need to make improvements, and to focus on developing the next generation of anti drone weaponry. The vendors had to demonstrate their respective technologies effectiveness, which included everything from threat detection to tracking too bringing down targeted drones, sometimes two at a time. So this is still very much in development, and while similar weapons may already be deployed, what we're really looking at is the refinement process intended to develop more effective anti drone defense systems. There have been a few people who have suggested that Elon Musk's quest to purchase Twitter has had at least something to do with his own tendency to post things that the United States securities and Exchange Commission or SEC, has objected to not that buying Twitter is going to change that at all, but whether that factored into his decision to purchase the company or not. The SEC is once again investigating Musk with relation to Twitter. This time, it's because Musk was late in submitting a form indicating his intent to purchase more than five percent of Twitter's shares. He ended up purchasing a little more than nine percent. That's something that investors are supposed to do when they plan to make that substantial and investment in a company, is to file that with the SEC. Musk apparently filed the form at least ten days after he was supposed to, and, according to the SEC, by not reporting the intended purchase in a timely manner, Musk was able to buy that stock essentially at a discount, potentially amounting to as much as a hundred forty three million dollars. How Well, if Musk had followed the proper protocol and submitted the form properly, that submission would be public information, which means investors would have seen that Musk was going to buy more than nine of Twitter's stocks, and that in turn could have been enough to drive up the share price, which would have increased the wealth of current shareholders or encouraged more people to buy into Twitter stock ahead of that actual purchase. And one shareholder has now filed a lawsuit against Musk, essentially arguing that by filing late, Musk robbed shareholders of potential wealth. The SEC could also seek its own lawsuit against Musk, but neither the shareholder lawsuit or a potential SEC lawsuit would likely have any real impact on the planned acquisition, which still requires shareholder and regulatory approval before it can go through. Let's start talking about Meta. There are a couple of stories to to cover now. The owner of Facebook, that being Meta, is looking to make some cutbacks to its Reality Labs division, which is the hardware centric part of Meta that develops mixed reality hardware. Apparently, at an internal meeting, leaders told employees to expect upcoming changes to be announced within a week or so, with those announcements being specific cutbacks. And this is a pretty dramatic turnaround from where we were in the fall of back. Then that's when Zuckerberg spoke at length about how the company was putting an intense focus on developing all things metaverse. I mean that's when they changed the company name from Facebook to Meta and the development includes making immersive hardware that will give people the chance to experience the metaverse. But you see, this dedicated focus on the metaverse comes at a massive cost. And if you skip ahead a few months to earlier this year, we learned that Facebook had experienced a drop in active users. That news shocked investors, who I guess clutched their pearls whenever certain numbers go down instead of up, and I might be getting increasingly grouchy about how the stock market works. Anyway, there was a drop in confidence from the investor community, and Meta reps said that the company would be cutting costs to reduce the negative impact on shareholders. Subsequently, news broke that the company was slowing down on hiring for mid to senior level positions within the company in general. And now we hear that they're going to be cutbacks that will put some of these reality labs projects on old at least for a while. Some might end up being shelved permanently. We do not yet know which of those projects are going to be impacted. We had previously heard that the division was working on four new headsets to aiming at a more premium space in the market, which really means you know, more features and more expensive, and too meant for a more of an entry level space in the market. Still expensive, but you know less. So not sure if any of those four are going to be impacted by these cutbacks or if this is actually going to affect projects that are further down the pipeline. Meta reps said there are no current plans for employee layoffs at this time, so that's good. I mean, I don't like Meta, but I really hate seeing people lose their jobs. In an earlier tech News episode, I talked about how Facebook relied on third party staffing services to hire content moderators in places like Africa. Now, one former employee is bringing a lawsuit against both Meta and one of those third party companies, a tech outsourcing firm called Sama, which is based out of San Francisco. This former employee argues that he was hired under false pretenses because he says he was never told that he would be working for Facebook and that he would be doing content moderation when he interviewed for the position. He relocated from South Africa to Kenya in order to take this job and then discovered what it was that he was meant to do. His lawsuit claims that this practice is a violation of Kenya's anti human trafficking laws. So the headlines about this all naturally say that Facebook is being sued for engaging in human trafficking. In fact, that's why I clicked on the story to read up on what was going on. Now, I don't know the particulars of this law in question, However, I have to assume the fact at the former employee allegedly had no idea who his employer was going to be or what his actual position was going to be while he relocated to another country has to factor into it. In addition, the former employee claims he was fired after he tried to organize other employees, so there are also charges of union busting wrapped up in this too. Now, on top of all that, the man says that exposure to truly horrifying material, which ranged from child abuse to videos of executions, has left him traumatized and impacted his physical and mental health. Now, y'all, I can tell you I could never be a content moderator on Facebook. Just my exposure to the normal news is enough to cause me mental distress, and that's the same stuff that everybody else is seeing all the time. Anyway, Meta reps have claimed that the company takes employee welfare seriously and holds their third party staffing service is accountable for providing fair pay, benefits and support, something that the lawsuit UH argues with, and SAMA that third party staffing service, for its part, denies that it engaged in any anti union behavior. So I'll have to see where the story goes from here. Okay, we've got some more news stories coming up, but first let's take a quick break. Last year, the state of Texas passed a law called HB twin Team, which would give Texans the right to sue social media platforms that have fifty million or more active monthly users if those users believe that they got a ban from those platforms due to their political views. So, in other words, if they think that they've been banned from a service because of their political views, they can sue the company within the state of Texas, UH if they are residents of Texas. That is, the law also forbids social networks from cutting off access to people in Texas in order to sidestep this issue, which y'all that is absolutely wild. Uh. It's left a lot of folks saying, where does Texas get off litigating how a business in another state conducts itself, Like if the business is incorporated, saying California, why gives Texas the authority to prevent that company from not providing service to Texas? Anyway. A federal judge previously passed an injunction against HB twenty, preventing it from going into effect until further judgment determined whether or not the law is you know, legal, and the Fifth U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals has now overturned that injunction and HB twenty is now in effect in Texas. I suspect this is just another stop on the journey to bringing this law ahead of the Supreme Court. But then, considering the current makeup of the U. S. Supreme Court, I can't confidently say that they will find the law to be unconstitutional, even though it appears to be pretty unconstitutional. The federal judge who passed the injunction had pointed out that passing the law infringed upon the freedom of speech for the actual social media platforms that these platforms have the right to establish codes of conduct and then they have the right to enforce those codes of conduct, and any state coming in to say no, you can't do that is akin to censorship, which you know is ironic because Texas was positioning its law as being anti censorship, but in fact Texas was engaging in censorship against the social platforms in order to do this. Anyway, HB twenty is just a terrible law, full stop. It's a terrible law. On top of that, one of the judges in the the Circuit Court of Appeals referred to Twitter as an Internet provider, which is just playing wrong, Like you can't get more wrong. Twitter provides a service that's on the Internet, but it's not an Internet provider. It's not providing Internet service. I swear Texas is like the upside down in Stranger Things. And I say that as a resident of Georgia, a state that has its own share of totally backwards legislation. Anyway, I can't wait to see where the story goes in the future, and my heart goes out to all the folks in Texas who opposed this kind of stuff. I understand how hard it can be to live in a state where leaders make bad decisions that reflect poorly on you, and you had nothing to do with it. Over in Europe, we're seeing another example of how leaders, in an effort to fight something that's truly hideous, in this case UH images and video of child sexual abuse use, they are pursuing rules that will have massive, unintended consequences and a negative impact. So the EU has proposed founding a new division to fight child abuse material online, as well as required tech companies to quote, detect, report, block and remove end quote such material from their platforms. On the surface, that all sounds fairly you know, reasonable right to detect, report, block, and remove child abuse material. And obviously this material is incredibly harmful and reporting it would be absolutely key in order to track down the people responsible and to stop them from abusing children. But it's the detect part that could be particularly disruptive and dangerous for lots of reasons. You see, for any platform that allows private messaging between people on that platform, if that platform is ordered to dete hecked this kind of material, well, to do that, it would have to scan messages that were being sent between individuals on the platform to see if any of that material was included in those messages. These could be messages that people presumably come on as being private and secure. It would also mean that end to end encryption would be pretty much impossible or rendered meaningless. A solid end to end encryption service would be created in such a way that no one other than the parties communicating would be able to see the contents of that communication. That includes the communications platform itself. So in other words, if company A allows true end to end encryption, company A has no way of knowing what is being sent over those messages. It cannot access those messages, it cannot scan them. So the only way to get around this is to do was called client side scanning. That means you would actually have to scan the material on the end devices once the material has been decrypted. So that would mean all users in the EU would have various companies scanning their personal devices for signs of this kind of material. Apple had actually proposed doing this and then put the plans on hold after receiving some pushback from civil rights activists, and those activists have argued that this kind of surveillance is really dangerous. It removes all privacy. Now, there is no denying that child abuse is horrible and it needs to be stopped and prevented. But researchers are suggesting that it might be better to use other methodologies rather than stripping away the possibility of true d end encryption, which promotes human rights, and that those methodologies can be things like analyzing metadata in order to detect criminal behavior and to stop it. Obviously, this is one of those really emotionally charged topics. It is hard to tackle. There are no easy solutions, and it is very clear that a solution is desperately needed, so it is a difficult situation to kind of suss out. A couple of weeks ago, we talked about how Netflix had a very rough call with investors as the company reported its first net loss and subscribers ever, and once again, you know, if numbers go the wrong way, the stock market goes bananas. Anyway, apart from this being another example of how reactionary things are in the investment world, it pushed Netflix to talk about the ways the company intends to drive up revenue and reduce costs in the future. Two of those ways involved clamping down on the practice of password sharing, and the other was to introduce ads. Two create different tiers of subscriptions now. The company says we might see both of these practices begin by the end of this year, and we have an idea of how this is probably going to play out. For one thing, Netflix has been experimenting with a model in a few countries in which households can pay a little bit extra in their monthly subscriptions and in return, they are authorized to share their password with at least a person outside of their household. So this this allows them for the case where someone who is not living under the same roof is able to access the service, so you pay a little bit more per month and you get a kind of adjunct household member who just happens to live outside the house. As for advertisements, the general belief is that Netflix would do something similar to what we've seen other platforms do in the past, which is that they offer a less expensive subscription model for folks who opt to have ads included in their service, and those who don't want ads will just have to pay a little bit more per month for a premium service. Whether this will address the issue of subscriber loss remains to be seen. Okay, I've got a couple more stories to go through before we get to those, let's take another quick break. One service that did not have Netflix's problems was Disney Plus. The mouse House reported that nearly eight million people joined as new subscribers to Disney Plus over the first quarter of twenty two, which was better than anticipated. This makes Disney Plus a leading company when it comes to growth. Keep in mind, like there are other services that are bigger, they're just not growing at the same rate as Disney Plus growth. Like again, this is why I think growth is a bad metric for success, because you could be growing really fast, but the reason for that might be that you're pretty small. So if you have two people on your service and then six more people sign up, you know that if you if you convert that over to percentages, looks really impressive, but when you look at the actual numbers, maybe not so much. Anyway, despite the fact that Disney Plus is growing very fast, faster than services like Hbo Max, the division is losing lots of money. In fact, it's losing money faster than it was before. This, by the way, is again one of the things that really puzzles me about business. It convinces me that all money is fake and we're all just playing pretend until it all falls apart. But yeah, Disney Plus is growing super fast and pulling in more money per subscriber on average, but it's also losing money faster because the cost of producing exclusive content for the platform is really high. We've seen this with other services as well. Netflix, in particular streaming platforms attracts subscribers primarily by securing exclusive content. Sometimes that is involved by signing deals with specific studios so that you have the exclusive right to stream that studio's content. In other cases, it involves funding productions directly, and this stuff is expensive you. Disney is reportedly considering introducing an ad supported subscription tier to Disney Plus in the future, similar to what Netflix is considering. Yesterday, Google kicked off its annual Io event. That's the one in which the company reveals new products and invites developers to become familiar with various platforms so that those developers can create stuff that can work on those platforms. Like this is where developers learn about increased features and and upcoming operating system updates, that kind of stuff. Now, I've attended one io event that was the year that they brought in Flight of the con Chords to play the after party. But I didn't know who Fly the Concords were at the time, and now I kick myself because if I had known, I would have been at the whole set instead of just at the tail end of it. Anyway, none of that matters. Let's talk about some of the stuff that Google showed off this year. So it teased the Pixel seven. This is going to be the next generation of the Pixel line of smartphones, the Android phones. The company plans to release a Pixel seven and a Pixel seven Pro, which is in line with what it's done over the last couple of years. Both of those phones will sport Google Tensor chips, but that's about all the information that the company was willing to part with at this stage. Google also announced the Pixel six A, which is meant to be a more budget friendly version of the Pixel six smartphone. It'll be slightly smaller, might lack a few other features. Uh, it will retail for four dollars, and one thing that the Pixel six A will not have is a headphone jack. Google has gone back and forth when it comes to including a physical headphone jack, and has even taken some potshots at Apple for having abandoned the headphone Jack in the past, but it looks like Google is doing the same thing, at least with the six A. Maybe that's because of another announcement that the company made, which is that the Pixel Buds Pro Earbuds, a a two dollar set of earbuds with noise cancelation and advanced microphones to allow for calls with a minimum of interference, are coming out this year. At long last, Google also unveiled the Pixel Watch, which will incorporate fitbit technology. That fitbit connection is critical because it means Google can rely upon tried and tested technology rather than developing everything from scratch. The company said it would be available in the fall, and it would be sold at a premium price, which probably means if you have to ask, you can't afford it, So I guess no Pixel Uch for me. Then. Google also showed off a prototype of some smart glasses that would be able to display translations in real time, meaning if you had two people and each of them had a pair of these glasses, they could have a conversation with one another even if neither of them spoke the other person's language, which is pretty cool. Uh, there's no telling if this prototype will ever become an actual product, but it is a nice demonstration of how augmented reality technology could have some real world applications outside of gimmicky stuff. The io event continues today, but usually we see all the big reveals on day one. But if anything huge gets announced today, I'll be sure to cover it in an episode next week. Finally, Bethesda, the video game studio and publisher, tweeted that upcoming video game titles Redfall and Starfield will not be coming out this year. The company has chosen to postpone the publication these games until the first half of three, citing the need to quote ensure that you received the best, most polished versions end quote. Bethesda first announced Starfield at e three way back in calling it a an all new i P, so not a continuation of any of the franchises Bethesda is known for, you know, stuff like Fallout and Skyrim or Elder Scrolls. I should say, and that this game puts players in the role of space explorers. Uh, there's not a whole lot more detail available about Starfield. There's a bit, but you know it's it's largely mysterious since it's a brand new I P. Red Fall is actually an arcane Studios title. Bethesda is the publisher, not the developer in this case, and it's a first person shooter game similar to titles like Left for Dead, in which players can assume one of four playable characters and up to four people can play cooperatively in a session x app. Instead of fighting off zombie hordes like you do and Left for Dead, where you're you know you're fighting off endless waves of zombies on your way to a safe zone, the Red Fall game is going to be about fighting off vampiric hordes as you presumably try to make your way to safety. I'm told there's more to it than that, and I'm being a bit snarky. It's my reaction is mostly based off of a teaser video about Red Fall that I saw a couple of years ago, where I thought, ah, it's Left for Dead, but with vampires. So I'm sure it's more complicated and sophisticated than that. So my apologies. It was just my initial reaction. And that's it for the Tech News for today. That's Thursday May twelve, two thousand twenty two. 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