Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio. And how the tech are you? It's time for the tech news for March third, twenty twenty two. Let's dive in. Meta's vice president of connectivity told c NBC at the Mobile World Congress, which is a big event that's all about things like smartphones. Uh, they said that the metaverse, at least Meta's vision of the metaverse, is going to require more advanced home and cellular networks in order for it to work properly. Now, that should not come as a surprise. Presumably. Meta's version of this admittedly vague concept includes virtual and potentially augmented reality hardware, and to make that kind of hardware work really well, you need really low latency. Oddly enough, folks can get pretty immersed in virtual environments even if the graphics are fairly primitive. So, like graphic resolution isn't hugely important. It's nice to have, but it's not necessary to have a convincing experience. However, high latency that is a perceptible lag between when you do something like turn your head and when it is reflected in the virtual world as in, like you turn your head and then after a moment your point of view shifts, that's a real problem. It creates this swimmy, unpleasant sensation, and latency really contributes to that feeling emotion sickness that some folks get when they try out VR. The greater the latency, the more the more people are going to feel not so good using the technology. And clearly, if you are banking on this being the future of the Internet, you need people to be comfortable using it. However, on top of all that, the Metaverse is presumably going to allow for a lot of other stuff besides just wandering around virtual environments. There's a whole commerce component to it. In fact, we'll be talking about that towards the end of this episode. And if there weren't other elements, like there were not commerce elements, Meta would not be boring billions of dollars into this Because you know, the company is doing this because this is where they see revenue generation being in the future, so they want upload and download speeds to be maxed out in order to keep up with what the company plans to throw in us, and I think this is also another reminder that whatever the metaverse does turn out to be or meta verses, because lots of companies are working on this, we're still several years out from it being a thing. I've often cited the general idea of it being ten years out from a truly engaging and compelling metaverse, because all the pieces that are going to play a part in making that happen are going to have to go through at least a couple more generations of evolutions before they meet the needs of sustaining and supporting a massive online virtual world capable of supporting tons of users simultaneously. Sticking with Meta, recently it released its Widely Viewed Content Report. This report was Meta's attempt to get ahead of other sources that would frequently produce lists of the most popular Facebook posts on the platform. So, for example, Kevin Ruce, who is a journalist with The New York Times, had created a Twitter account that pulled data from a monitoring platform that Facebook created. So this was a Facebook tool and it was called crowd Tangle, and this Twitter account was just pulling data from that to generate a top ten list of where the most popular links were coming from in the United States a week and then tweeting it out, and a lot of them. In fact, most of them belonged to various right wing outlets, and this appeared to suggest that Facebook was potentially supporting right wing sources more than others, perhaps in an attempt to fight back against a perception that Facebook suppresses right leaning points of view. Now, Facebook was not thrilled with this use of its tool, and in fact squashed the crowd Tangle project the internal project, and now the company produces its own report, presumably to push back against this perception that the platform is you know, has a bias towards boosting right leaning messaging. And the report is fairly vague when it comes to how Facebook determines things like the most popular posts and such, but it largely shows that the most popular pages and links tend to be connected to stuff like entertainment or recipe, you know, relatively trivial things. However, there's one standout weird thing in the report, and that is there's a listing of the most viewed pages during the last quarter of one and the top spot goes to a mystery, at least a mystery for anyone who's outside of Facebook, because in the report under the source it says, quote, this page was removed by Facebook for violating community standards end quote, and there's a link to the page, but of course the page has been removed, so that link is inactive. It doesn't take you to anything, and Facebook didn't actually identify what the page actually was or who made it. However, it does helpfully show that a hundred twenty one point eight million accounts on Facebook viewed that page's content, which means not only is it number one, the the most viewed page of Facebook during that period, it actually puts it more than ten million views ahead of second place. So if Facebook's intent was for this report to assuage doubts about the platform, it ain't working. Not when the most popular page was one that Facebook subsequently removed because the page was violating Facebook's rules. That actually kind of suggests that Facebook ain't so great and enforcing its own rules if the page got to that level of popularity before it was booted off the platform. Anyway, even if you think of the report is Facebook's attempt to change the narrative, it looks to me like that attempt wasn't particularly successful, and one more Facebook specific story for today. The site recently pulled the plug on its pilot program called Campus Uh. That project was meant to create a suite of features catered specifically toward college students and a lot of y'all probably remember that Facebook started out as a college based online social network. In fact, originally in the old days, in order to get a Facebook account, you had to have an active college email account. But it looks like whatever mojo was there back in the early to mid two thousand's is all gone now because Campus is closed. Meta says that the Campus project taught the company many things, chief of which is that college students can make better use of tools like Facebook groups to do what Campus was trying to do. So, in other words, they said, well, there's no need to reinvent the wheel. College students are relying on groups and that seems to be exactly what they need. Of course, we also know that Facebook has seen a decline in user adoption among younger users. Fewer younger people are joining Facebook, so it may also be that the company was not seeing enough students actually using Campus to justify its continued support, like it would just be a drain on company resources and they pulled the plug. That's also a possibility. This week, US President Joe Biden delivered his State of the Union address, which obviously covers a lot of territory, but part of that speech was a call on Congress to create and pass legislation that will increase protections around data privacy and security with regard to children. He was specifically referencing social media and social networking platforms like TikTok and Instagram. He said, quote, it's time to strengthen privacy protections, band targeted advertising to children, demand tech companies stopped collecting personal data on our children end quote, And he announced that the White House is looking to fund a study on child safety on social media platforms. Now, we've already seen plenty of disturbing evidence out of meta itself that suggests the picture on its effects on on children ain't good. But it's also important to remember that those studies, those reports, we're based off pretty small sample sizes, So it actually does make sense to expand on that and to do a larger study, especially one that's conducted outside the company, so there's not the chance of company bias in there. And there's already some movement in Congress on this subject, because this is a topic that actually has support across both political parties, which is pretty darn rare these days. Obviously, should this start to evolve into proposed legislation, we're going to see differences of opinion on how to structure laws meant to restrict companies and how they conduct their business. That's just gonna happen. But I think everyone's going to maintain the idea of if this is to protect children, we have to be on board because you don't want your next political opponent to run ads saying we started, we proposed a law to protect your children and this person struck it down. That would just be political suicide. So I expect we will see more movement on this, just don't know how it's going to emerge. Okay, we've got some more news stories to cover before we get to those, let's take a quick break. Before the break, I was talking about the President's State of the Union address that is a federal response to the matter of child safety online. We're also seeing individual states in the United States take action. California, Florida, and Kentucky are among those. The attorneys general for those states have joined in on an investigation into the video platform TikTok to determine how the app might affect the mental and physical health of young people who are using it. Now. This includes not just the actual content sit on TikTok, which is of course user generated, but also how TikTok markets its services to children and how TikTok serves up recommended content to children. Just like all other social media platforms, much of TikTok's success is defined by engagement. So for TikTok, that largely translates into how long can we keep people on the platform per session, And so the recommendation algorithm, which is meant to serve up stuff that's most likely to keep you glued to TikTok, is fundamentally important. You want that algorithm to successfully serve up stuff that keeps people there. Well, if that stuff tends to be harmful, well that means that the user is likely going to get served up a lot of harmful material repeatedly. So we're seeing a more concentrated effort to really look at these issues and their effects on users, particularly young users. And depending upon the outcome of this investigation, I expect we may see several states proposed laws and regulations that will restrict how TikTok can serve content to young people, which would probably mean they would also require some sort of of age verification step where the platform can say, listen, we are making sure that anyone who is under a certain age will not get access to certain materials. But age verification steps, age restrictions, those are always tricky as well, and they come along with some other consequences which I'll probably talk about in a future episode. Now, y'all, I've never been inside a brick and mortar Amazon bookstore, and now it sounds like I won't never get that chance. The company is closing it's sixty eight Amazon Books, Amazon four Star, and Amazon Pop up stores across the United States and the United Kingdom. Now, if you weren't aware that Amazon operated these kinds of physical stores, well it did, and now it's not gonna do that anymore. The Amazon four Star Store was a kind of general products store. It was called four Star because it's sold stuff that had a four star or better rating in the online Amazon store. It was also a physical store where Amazon sold a lot of Amazon branded products, and it also served as a physical location where people could return stuff they had bought off Amazon Online, and shutting down those stores means you've cut back on those options. The Amazon pop up stores were more like small shops set in places like shopping malls, and the pop up stores would frequently feature a specific subset of products like it would be almost themed, and then after a certain amount of time, it would change that up. Anyway, all of those are shutting down, but Amazon will still operate other physical stores like Whole Foods grocery stores aren't going anywhere, uh, and the cashier less Amazon Go convenience stores are sticking around. Two Over on Reddit, folks are having a heck of a time talking about how Amazon's digital store wiped out its own brick and border stores, So sad Trombo. Earlier this week, I gave an update on unionization efforts among Amazon employees. You've got one warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama that will be counting union votes later this month in order to determine if enough employees there will support a union, in which case they will unionize. Then there's the JFK eight warehouse in New York that is heading toward a vote of its own, And now a second New York based location, the Staten Island l d J five Warehouse, has requested permission from the National Labor Relations Board a gay the n l RB to move forward with their own unionization efforts. Now. I mentioned earlier that the activity we're seeing in this space could be indicators for a growing labor movement in the United States, and this is the kind of thing I was talking about. I don't have many more details about this recent development just yet. The n l RB has not yet confirmed whether or not it has approved the request that the the Staten Island group made, at least not as of the recording of this episode. Fitbit has had to recall more than one and a half million ionic smart watches after numerous users reported being burned by the battery overheating in the device. The smart watch does all the stuff we've come to expect from smart watches. It tracks activity, can be used to monitor sleep patterns, tells the time, but apparently a problem with the lithium ion batteries has led to massive overheating issues with some watches. More than one people have reported experiencing burn injuries, and two of those have been third degree burns, which are incredibly serious. You're talking about massive tissue damage with that. And we've seen similar problems with lithium ion batteries in the past. When there's a manufacturing error or when a battery gets damaged, there is a chance for a short circuit. That's when the flow of electrons bypasses the normal circuit route and there's a more direct path between the anode and the cathode and the battery, and so the electrochemical reactions just speed up, and the battery heats up, pressure builds up inside the battery, and then you end up with a fire or sometimes an explosion. That's what happened with the Samsung Galaxy Notes seven several years ago. This is also why airlines tell you not to put anything with a lithium ion battery in your check luggage, because if a battery overheats in the plane's cargo, it can cause a serious fire that can become a huge risk before anyone is even aware of it. Now, that's not to say that all lithium ion batteries are just a fire waiting to happen. I mean, I've got a ton of different devices that have lithium ion batteries. None of them have ever caught fire. What this does mean is that when there are these men facturing errors, we have to take them seriously. As for Fitbit, it is offering a two refund for people who purchased the watches, as well as a discount code for a future Fitbit device. In news that initially made me say, ha, we've learned that Epic Games, the company behind the massively popular game Fortnite, has acquired band Camp. Now, if you're not familiar with band Camp, it's a site that serves as the platform mainly for independent musicians, letting them sell their music to fans through an online store and to have an online community for their fandom. And it's pretty great. And I've picked up a lot of music through band Camp, through bands that I like that you know they aren't signed to any labels. Also bought some commentary tracks for films. I'm pretty sure that's how I picked up a whole bunch of red letter media commentary tracks for different movies. So at first I was wondering what the heck is going on here? I mean, why is why is Epic buying it? Well, Epic has said that band cap will fulfill an quote important role in Epics vision to build out a creator marketplace ecosystem for content, technology, games, art, music, and more. End quote, and that also came as news to me. I usually think of Epic as that company that makes these incredible license agreements with highly recognizable intellectual property. Also that you can do stuff like that flossing dance as Darth Vader in Fortnite or whatever. I don't think of Epic as a company that's championing independent creators and making sure that they get compensated for their work. I don't That's not what I think of when I think of Epic. Uh. And the parties didn't divulge the details around the deal, so we don't know how much it was for. We don't know how much Epic shelled out, And I'm not sure how I would feel about this if I were a musician currently depending upon band cap to sell stuff to fans and stay connected with them, and I order if perhaps this was also a step towards Epic Games making its own metaverse related moves, and I guess we're just gonna have to wait and see. Elsewhere in the gaming world, the streaming service Netflix is planning an acquisition of a finish game company as in a game company out of Finland. It's called Next Games, and this company developed a mobile puzzle RPG style game based on the Netflix property Stranger Things. So Netflix has been making a few moves into the gaming space. They established a division called Netflix Games last year. If you are a Netflix subscriber, you can actually use an app to download mobile games that are carried by Netflix Games. You can play them without ads or in app purchases. It's part of your subscription, So there are those benefits. Like if you've ever played a lot of mobile games, you know most of them typically have a lot of ads or in app purchase items, So this is one way to experience mobile games that don't have that. Of course, you're limited to whatever Netflix Games is actually carrying. I have to look into Netflix Games further at some point, maybe do a full episode, because I'm currently not sure how popular the services or how many Netflix users are even aware it exists. Um, I've heard about it, I've never used it, but then to be fair, I also very rarely use Netflix these days. It's almost like I'm just paying to have it. Uh, Once in a blue moon I watched something on it, But I'm rapidly approaching that point where I'm asking myself, do I need to maintain my Netflix subscription? Maybe the games is the thing that will make me say, yeah, no, I should keep it. We'll have to see. We have some more news items that we're going to go through after we take this quick break. Not that long ago, I did an episode about the semiconductor business in Taiwan and has specifically looked at the company t S m C, and I mentioned how Taiwan has a peculiar relationship with mainland China. Short version is that the former Chinese government prior to or so, that's the Chinese government that was ousted by the Chinese Communist Party, which is currently controlling China. Well, that that former political party, our governing body, fled to Taiwan and took that over nearly a century ago, and now there's this uneasy tension between Taiwan and mainland China. Um, you'll often hear to China's or you'll hear like a unified China. You hear a lot of rhetoric around that. But um, the the character of a unified China completely depends upon which party you're talking to, because it's very different from the mainland perspective than from the Taiwan perspective, and part of that tension emerges as acts of industrial espionage, and the Taiwanese government is looking to pass some laws to protect the semiconductor industry from Chinese spies. The law would impose a punishment for people who leak trade secrets to China or to other foreign enemy forces, and that punishment could be a prison sentence of up to twelve years. The government is also looking to pass laws that would make it harder for China to lure away engineering talent from Taiwan. So far, these regulations are not yet law. The parliament in Taiwan will have to pass them before that will happen, and Taiwan's adversarial relationship with mainland China is one of many reasons as to why there's been such a strong push around the world to develop new semiconductor fabrication facilities because it helps mitigate risks. Part of it was because of issues with COVID impacting the supply chain, but another part is that should China ever take any serious action to try and absorb tai on, it would have a massive ripple effect through the semiconductor industry and tech as in general. Apple co founder Steve Wozniak is one of several people behind a company called Privateer, and the mission for that company is to set up a system that will identify track and catalog objects in space, so satellites and stuff, but also space junk, and then make that information available to companies and countries that are intending to launch satellites and other spacecraft into Earth orbit. Space junk stands as a real threat in space. Even tiny objects can cause massive damage because you have to remember, though they might be small, they're traveling super fast. And as we launch more stuff into orbit, then things get more and more crowded, and accidents like collisions can create a lot more space junk. Stuff can break apart and just create kind of like a shotgun pellet approach, except these are shotgun pellets that are traveling at thousands of miles per hour. And then there's the various military tests we've seen in which countries like China have used land based weapons systems to target orbiting satellites and destroy them, thus potentially creating a lot more space junk in orbit. So Privateers goal is to get a better picture of what's actually going on up there, What where are these pieces, how many are there, how fast are they traveling, what orbits are they in? And potentially that will allow us to spot problems early on and avoid them when we need to send missions out into space. Now, the company ultimately hopes to launch some satellites of its own in the future for the purposes of spotting and tracking space junk. And yes, I do recognize the irony of putting more stuff up into space so that you can figure out how much stuff is in space, But these satellites would in theory, be able to identify very small pieces of space junk, like on the order of ten centimeters or smaller. Uh So it could be incredibly valuable. In fact, having the information would be incredibly valuable. It would be great if we could find a way to clean up space junk. There have been some different proposals, and in fact I've seen some titles that seem to suggest that that's what Privateer was doing, But really Privateer is more about we can't even think about cleaning stuff up until we know how much stuff is there and you know where it's at, And it's hard to argue against that. You know there's a longstanding joke. In fact, you could argue it's not a joke that if you roll up on a Mickey D's and you ask for an ice cream, you're just going to be told that the machines are broken. And yeah, McDonald's soft serve ice cream machines have a reputation for being really finicky, uh, And that inspired a couple of technologists named Melissa Nelson and Jeremy O'Sullivan to co found a company called Kitch k Y T c H. And Kitch subsequently created a phone sized electronic device that can connect to these ice cream machines that mcdot don olds uses, and so the device can actually read error codes on the machines and send messages to franchise owners and they can access those messages via an app or by a web portal, and then they can get notified when something is is not working properly so that they can get it fixed very quickly and minimize machine downtime, which has a positive impact on customer experience as well as on you know, restaurant revenue. Well, apparently corporate McDonald's didn't like this very much at all, and in twenty twenty, the company sent franchise owners messages that they were to remove the kitchen devices from their ice cream machines because altering the machines violated warranties. And it also, according to the message, intercepted confidential information. Now I don't know about you, but I'm really curious what the heck kind of confidential information and ice cream machine is actually generating or transmitting. I mean, I guess it has to be related to the Cold War, right, because ice cream no Cold War, get it. Anyway, The Kitch co founders say that the emails included defamatory statements in them, and in fact McDonald's was trying to force franchise owners to hold off for a future ice cream machine from the same company that so far as seen limited deployment, but it does incorporate technologies that appear to have been copied from Kitches products. So essentially they're saying, not only are you, you know, destroying our business, you are infringing on our intellectual property you have, you have copied it, and you're you're muscling us out. That's what Kitch has been saying. So Kitch has subsequently filed lawsuits against Taylor, which is the company that makes the ice cream machines and McDonald's itself. According to a Wired article on the subject, during the discovery period of the lawsuit against Taylor, Kitch learned that the most that most of the opposition was coming straight from McDonald's, not from Taylor, but from corporate McDonald's itself. The article is well worth a read. It is titled ice cream machine hackers sue McDonald's for nine hundred million dollars. That is a heck of a headline. And finally, speaking of headlines, Business Insider reports that wings Stop, the restaurant known for chicken wings, has filed a quote trademark to sell chicken wings in the metaverse. End quote that their headline was just about enough to make me want to walk into the woods just live there. But anyway, Wingstop is not the only restaurant going through these steps. McDonald's has done it too, which leads one to wonder if ice cream machines are gonna work better in the metaverse anyway. It sounds like these trademarks include downloadable virtual goods, so presumably stuff like virtual Big Max and virtual wings I guess, or maybe virtual clothing that has logos on it. I don't know, and also it's supposed to cover things like n f t s that represent digital assets. Seriously, y'all, I cannot with this nonsense. It is making me feel like I have stepped into a parody of the real world. Anyway, there may also be ways to order, you know, real world food while you're in the metaverse, so I don't know, maybe in the future, when you want to use a delivery service to order a big Mac or Wings or something, you first have to put on VR goggles and navigate to the closest virtual restaurant or something. I hate all of this. Of course, a lot of these moves could just be hail Mary passes that the various companies are throwing all in an effort so that they don't get left behind in this crazy rush towards the metaverse, and those moves might prove to be unnecessary or misguided in the future, like it might turn out like, oh, none of is actually applicable, or maybe they'll turn out that these were really acts of genius and they have huge payoffs down the line. I honestly can't tell anymore. And that's the news. So if you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, preferably topics that do not drive me closer to the brink of insanity. Please reach out to me on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio. And how the tech are you? It's time for the tech news for March third, twenty twenty two. Let's dive in. Meta's vice president of connectivity told c NBC at the Mobile World Congress, which is a big event that's all about things like smartphones. Uh, they said that the metaverse, at least Meta's vision of the metaverse, is going to require more advanced home and cellular networks in order for it to work properly. Now, that should not come as a surprise. Presumably. Meta's version of this admittedly vague concept includes virtual and potentially augmented reality hardware, and to make that kind of hardware work really well, you need really low latency. Oddly enough, folks can get pretty immersed in virtual environments even if the graphics are fairly primitive. So, like graphic resolution isn't hugely important. It's nice to have, but it's not necessary to have a convincing experience. However, high latency that is a perceptible lag between when you do something like turn your head and when it is reflected in the virtual world as in, like you turn your head and then after a moment your point of view shifts, that's a real problem. It creates this swimmy, unpleasant sensation, and latency really contributes to that feeling emotion sickness that some folks get when they try out VR. The greater the latency, the more the more people are going to feel not so good using the technology. And clearly, if you are banking on this being the future of the Internet, you need people to be comfortable using it. However, on top of all that, the Metaverse is presumably going to allow for a lot of other stuff besides just wandering around virtual environments. There's a whole commerce component to it. In fact, we'll be talking about that towards the end of this episode. And if there weren't other elements, like there were not commerce elements, Meta would not be boring billions of dollars into this Because you know, the company is doing this because this is where they see revenue generation being in the future, so they want upload and download speeds to be maxed out in order to keep up with what the company plans to throw in us, and I think this is also another reminder that whatever the metaverse does turn out to be or meta verses, because lots of companies are working on this, we're still several years out from it being a thing. I've often cited the general idea of it being ten years out from a truly engaging and compelling metaverse, because all the pieces that are going to play a part in making that happen are going to have to go through at least a couple more generations of evolutions before they meet the needs of sustaining and supporting a massive online virtual world capable of supporting tons of users simultaneously. Sticking with Meta, recently it released its Widely Viewed Content Report. This report was Meta's attempt to get ahead of other sources that would frequently produce lists of the most popular Facebook posts on the platform. So, for example, Kevin Ruce, who is a journalist with The New York Times, had created a Twitter account that pulled data from a monitoring platform that Facebook created. So this was a Facebook tool and it was called crowd Tangle, and this Twitter account was just pulling data from that to generate a top ten list of where the most popular links were coming from in the United States a week and then tweeting it out, and a lot of them. In fact, most of them belonged to various right wing outlets, and this appeared to suggest that Facebook was potentially supporting right wing sources more than others, perhaps in an attempt to fight back against a perception that Facebook suppresses right leaning points of view. Now, Facebook was not thrilled with this use of its tool, and in fact squashed the crowd Tangle project the internal project, and now the company produces its own report, presumably to push back against this perception that the platform is you know, has a bias towards boosting right leaning messaging. And the report is fairly vague when it comes to how Facebook determines things like the most popular posts and such, but it largely shows that the most popular pages and links tend to be connected to stuff like entertainment or recipe, you know, relatively trivial things. However, there's one standout weird thing in the report, and that is there's a listing of the most viewed pages during the last quarter of one and the top spot goes to a mystery, at least a mystery for anyone who's outside of Facebook, because in the report under the source it says, quote, this page was removed by Facebook for violating community standards end quote, and there's a link to the page, but of course the page has been removed, so that link is inactive. It doesn't take you to anything, and Facebook didn't actually identify what the page actually was or who made it. However, it does helpfully show that a hundred twenty one point eight million accounts on Facebook viewed that page's content, which means not only is it number one, the the most viewed page of Facebook during that period, it actually puts it more than ten million views ahead of second place. So if Facebook's intent was for this report to assuage doubts about the platform, it ain't working. Not when the most popular page was one that Facebook subsequently removed because the page was violating Facebook's rules. That actually kind of suggests that Facebook ain't so great and enforcing its own rules if the page got to that level of popularity before it was booted off the platform. Anyway, even if you think of the report is Facebook's attempt to change the narrative, it looks to me like that attempt wasn't particularly successful, and one more Facebook specific story for today. The site recently pulled the plug on its pilot program called Campus Uh. That project was meant to create a suite of features catered specifically toward college students and a lot of y'all probably remember that Facebook started out as a college based online social network. In fact, originally in the old days, in order to get a Facebook account, you had to have an active college email account. But it looks like whatever mojo was there back in the early to mid two thousand's is all gone now because Campus is closed. Meta says that the Campus project taught the company many things, chief of which is that college students can make better use of tools like Facebook groups to do what Campus was trying to do. So, in other words, they said, well, there's no need to reinvent the wheel. College students are relying on groups and that seems to be exactly what they need. Of course, we also know that Facebook has seen a decline in user adoption among younger users. Fewer younger people are joining Facebook, so it may also be that the company was not seeing enough students actually using Campus to justify its continued support, like it would just be a drain on company resources and they pulled the plug. That's also a possibility. This week, US President Joe Biden delivered his State of the Union address, which obviously covers a lot of territory, but part of that speech was a call on Congress to create and pass legislation that will increase protections around data privacy and security with regard to children. He was specifically referencing social media and social networking platforms like TikTok and Instagram. He said, quote, it's time to strengthen privacy protections, band targeted advertising to children, demand tech companies stopped collecting personal data on our children end quote, And he announced that the White House is looking to fund a study on child safety on social media platforms. Now, we've already seen plenty of disturbing evidence out of meta itself that suggests the picture on its effects on on children ain't good. But it's also important to remember that those studies, those reports, we're based off pretty small sample sizes, So it actually does make sense to expand on that and to do a larger study, especially one that's conducted outside the company, so there's not the chance of company bias in there. And there's already some movement in Congress on this subject, because this is a topic that actually has support across both political parties, which is pretty darn rare these days. Obviously, should this start to evolve into proposed legislation, we're going to see differences of opinion on how to structure laws meant to restrict companies and how they conduct their business. That's just gonna happen. But I think everyone's going to maintain the idea of if this is to protect children, we have to be on board because you don't want your next political opponent to run ads saying we started, we proposed a law to protect your children and this person struck it down. That would just be political suicide. So I expect we will see more movement on this, just don't know how it's going to emerge. Okay, we've got some more news stories to cover before we get to those, let's take a quick break. Before the break, I was talking about the President's State of the Union address that is a federal response to the matter of child safety online. We're also seeing individual states in the United States take action. California, Florida, and Kentucky are among those. The attorneys general for those states have joined in on an investigation into the video platform TikTok to determine how the app might affect the mental and physical health of young people who are using it. Now. This includes not just the actual content sit on TikTok, which is of course user generated, but also how TikTok markets its services to children and how TikTok serves up recommended content to children. Just like all other social media platforms, much of TikTok's success is defined by engagement. So for TikTok, that largely translates into how long can we keep people on the platform per session, And so the recommendation algorithm, which is meant to serve up stuff that's most likely to keep you glued to TikTok, is fundamentally important. You want that algorithm to successfully serve up stuff that keeps people there. Well, if that stuff tends to be harmful, well that means that the user is likely going to get served up a lot of harmful material repeatedly. So we're seeing a more concentrated effort to really look at these issues and their effects on users, particularly young users. And depending upon the outcome of this investigation, I expect we may see several states proposed laws and regulations that will restrict how TikTok can serve content to young people, which would probably mean they would also require some sort of of age verification step where the platform can say, listen, we are making sure that anyone who is under a certain age will not get access to certain materials. But age verification steps, age restrictions, those are always tricky as well, and they come along with some other consequences which I'll probably talk about in a future episode. Now, y'all, I've never been inside a brick and mortar Amazon bookstore, and now it sounds like I won't never get that chance. The company is closing it's sixty eight Amazon Books, Amazon four Star, and Amazon Pop up stores across the United States and the United Kingdom. Now, if you weren't aware that Amazon operated these kinds of physical stores, well it did, and now it's not gonna do that anymore. The Amazon four Star Store was a kind of general products store. It was called four Star because it's sold stuff that had a four star or better rating in the online Amazon store. It was also a physical store where Amazon sold a lot of Amazon branded products, and it also served as a physical location where people could return stuff they had bought off Amazon Online, and shutting down those stores means you've cut back on those options. The Amazon pop up stores were more like small shops set in places like shopping malls, and the pop up stores would frequently feature a specific subset of products like it would be almost themed, and then after a certain amount of time, it would change that up. Anyway, all of those are shutting down, but Amazon will still operate other physical stores like Whole Foods grocery stores aren't going anywhere, uh, and the cashier less Amazon Go convenience stores are sticking around. Two Over on Reddit, folks are having a heck of a time talking about how Amazon's digital store wiped out its own brick and border stores, So sad Trombo. Earlier this week, I gave an update on unionization efforts among Amazon employees. You've got one warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama that will be counting union votes later this month in order to determine if enough employees there will support a union, in which case they will unionize. Then there's the JFK eight warehouse in New York that is heading toward a vote of its own, And now a second New York based location, the Staten Island l d J five Warehouse, has requested permission from the National Labor Relations Board a gay the n l RB to move forward with their own unionization efforts. Now. I mentioned earlier that the activity we're seeing in this space could be indicators for a growing labor movement in the United States, and this is the kind of thing I was talking about. I don't have many more details about this recent development just yet. The n l RB has not yet confirmed whether or not it has approved the request that the the Staten Island group made, at least not as of the recording of this episode. Fitbit has had to recall more than one and a half million ionic smart watches after numerous users reported being burned by the battery overheating in the device. The smart watch does all the stuff we've come to expect from smart watches. It tracks activity, can be used to monitor sleep patterns, tells the time, but apparently a problem with the lithium ion batteries has led to massive overheating issues with some watches. More than one people have reported experiencing burn injuries, and two of those have been third degree burns, which are incredibly serious. You're talking about massive tissue damage with that. And we've seen similar problems with lithium ion batteries in the past. When there's a manufacturing error or when a battery gets damaged, there is a chance for a short circuit. That's when the flow of electrons bypasses the normal circuit route and there's a more direct path between the anode and the cathode and the battery, and so the electrochemical reactions just speed up, and the battery heats up, pressure builds up inside the battery, and then you end up with a fire or sometimes an explosion. That's what happened with the Samsung Galaxy Notes seven several years ago. This is also why airlines tell you not to put anything with a lithium ion battery in your check luggage, because if a battery overheats in the plane's cargo, it can cause a serious fire that can become a huge risk before anyone is even aware of it. Now, that's not to say that all lithium ion batteries are just a fire waiting to happen. I mean, I've got a ton of different devices that have lithium ion batteries. None of them have ever caught fire. What this does mean is that when there are these men facturing errors, we have to take them seriously. As for Fitbit, it is offering a two refund for people who purchased the watches, as well as a discount code for a future Fitbit device. In news that initially made me say, ha, we've learned that Epic Games, the company behind the massively popular game Fortnite, has acquired band Camp. Now, if you're not familiar with band Camp, it's a site that serves as the platform mainly for independent musicians, letting them sell their music to fans through an online store and to have an online community for their fandom. And it's pretty great. And I've picked up a lot of music through band Camp, through bands that I like that you know they aren't signed to any labels. Also bought some commentary tracks for films. I'm pretty sure that's how I picked up a whole bunch of red letter media commentary tracks for different movies. So at first I was wondering what the heck is going on here? I mean, why is why is Epic buying it? Well, Epic has said that band cap will fulfill an quote important role in Epics vision to build out a creator marketplace ecosystem for content, technology, games, art, music, and more. End quote, and that also came as news to me. I usually think of Epic as that company that makes these incredible license agreements with highly recognizable intellectual property. Also that you can do stuff like that flossing dance as Darth Vader in Fortnite or whatever. I don't think of Epic as a company that's championing independent creators and making sure that they get compensated for their work. I don't That's not what I think of when I think of Epic. Uh. And the parties didn't divulge the details around the deal, so we don't know how much it was for. We don't know how much Epic shelled out, And I'm not sure how I would feel about this if I were a musician currently depending upon band cap to sell stuff to fans and stay connected with them, and I order if perhaps this was also a step towards Epic Games making its own metaverse related moves, and I guess we're just gonna have to wait and see. Elsewhere in the gaming world, the streaming service Netflix is planning an acquisition of a finish game company as in a game company out of Finland. It's called Next Games, and this company developed a mobile puzzle RPG style game based on the Netflix property Stranger Things. So Netflix has been making a few moves into the gaming space. They established a division called Netflix Games last year. If you are a Netflix subscriber, you can actually use an app to download mobile games that are carried by Netflix Games. You can play them without ads or in app purchases. It's part of your subscription, So there are those benefits. Like if you've ever played a lot of mobile games, you know most of them typically have a lot of ads or in app purchase items, So this is one way to experience mobile games that don't have that. Of course, you're limited to whatever Netflix Games is actually carrying. I have to look into Netflix Games further at some point, maybe do a full episode, because I'm currently not sure how popular the services or how many Netflix users are even aware it exists. Um, I've heard about it, I've never used it, but then to be fair, I also very rarely use Netflix these days. It's almost like I'm just paying to have it. Uh, Once in a blue moon I watched something on it, But I'm rapidly approaching that point where I'm asking myself, do I need to maintain my Netflix subscription? Maybe the games is the thing that will make me say, yeah, no, I should keep it. We'll have to see. We have some more news items that we're going to go through after we take this quick break. Not that long ago, I did an episode about the semiconductor business in Taiwan and has specifically looked at the company t S m C, and I mentioned how Taiwan has a peculiar relationship with mainland China. Short version is that the former Chinese government prior to or so, that's the Chinese government that was ousted by the Chinese Communist Party, which is currently controlling China. Well, that that former political party, our governing body, fled to Taiwan and took that over nearly a century ago, and now there's this uneasy tension between Taiwan and mainland China. Um, you'll often hear to China's or you'll hear like a unified China. You hear a lot of rhetoric around that. But um, the the character of a unified China completely depends upon which party you're talking to, because it's very different from the mainland perspective than from the Taiwan perspective, and part of that tension emerges as acts of industrial espionage, and the Taiwanese government is looking to pass some laws to protect the semiconductor industry from Chinese spies. The law would impose a punishment for people who leak trade secrets to China or to other foreign enemy forces, and that punishment could be a prison sentence of up to twelve years. The government is also looking to pass laws that would make it harder for China to lure away engineering talent from Taiwan. So far, these regulations are not yet law. The parliament in Taiwan will have to pass them before that will happen, and Taiwan's adversarial relationship with mainland China is one of many reasons as to why there's been such a strong push around the world to develop new semiconductor fabrication facilities because it helps mitigate risks. Part of it was because of issues with COVID impacting the supply chain, but another part is that should China ever take any serious action to try and absorb tai on, it would have a massive ripple effect through the semiconductor industry and tech as in general. Apple co founder Steve Wozniak is one of several people behind a company called Privateer, and the mission for that company is to set up a system that will identify track and catalog objects in space, so satellites and stuff, but also space junk, and then make that information available to companies and countries that are intending to launch satellites and other spacecraft into Earth orbit. Space junk stands as a real threat in space. Even tiny objects can cause massive damage because you have to remember, though they might be small, they're traveling super fast. And as we launch more stuff into orbit, then things get more and more crowded, and accidents like collisions can create a lot more space junk. Stuff can break apart and just create kind of like a shotgun pellet approach, except these are shotgun pellets that are traveling at thousands of miles per hour. And then there's the various military tests we've seen in which countries like China have used land based weapons systems to target orbiting satellites and destroy them, thus potentially creating a lot more space junk in orbit. So Privateers goal is to get a better picture of what's actually going on up there, What where are these pieces, how many are there, how fast are they traveling, what orbits are they in? And potentially that will allow us to spot problems early on and avoid them when we need to send missions out into space. Now, the company ultimately hopes to launch some satellites of its own in the future for the purposes of spotting and tracking space junk. And yes, I do recognize the irony of putting more stuff up into space so that you can figure out how much stuff is in space, But these satellites would in theory, be able to identify very small pieces of space junk, like on the order of ten centimeters or smaller. Uh So it could be incredibly valuable. In fact, having the information would be incredibly valuable. It would be great if we could find a way to clean up space junk. There have been some different proposals, and in fact I've seen some titles that seem to suggest that that's what Privateer was doing, But really Privateer is more about we can't even think about cleaning stuff up until we know how much stuff is there and you know where it's at, And it's hard to argue against that. You know there's a longstanding joke. In fact, you could argue it's not a joke that if you roll up on a Mickey D's and you ask for an ice cream, you're just going to be told that the machines are broken. And yeah, McDonald's soft serve ice cream machines have a reputation for being really finicky, uh, And that inspired a couple of technologists named Melissa Nelson and Jeremy O'Sullivan to co found a company called Kitch k Y T c H. And Kitch subsequently created a phone sized electronic device that can connect to these ice cream machines that mcdot don olds uses, and so the device can actually read error codes on the machines and send messages to franchise owners and they can access those messages via an app or by a web portal, and then they can get notified when something is is not working properly so that they can get it fixed very quickly and minimize machine downtime, which has a positive impact on customer experience as well as on you know, restaurant revenue. Well, apparently corporate McDonald's didn't like this very much at all, and in twenty twenty, the company sent franchise owners messages that they were to remove the kitchen devices from their ice cream machines because altering the machines violated warranties. And it also, according to the message, intercepted confidential information. Now I don't know about you, but I'm really curious what the heck kind of confidential information and ice cream machine is actually generating or transmitting. I mean, I guess it has to be related to the Cold War, right, because ice cream no Cold War, get it. Anyway, The Kitch co founders say that the emails included defamatory statements in them, and in fact McDonald's was trying to force franchise owners to hold off for a future ice cream machine from the same company that so far as seen limited deployment, but it does incorporate technologies that appear to have been copied from Kitches products. So essentially they're saying, not only are you, you know, destroying our business, you are infringing on our intellectual property you have, you have copied it, and you're you're muscling us out. That's what Kitch has been saying. So Kitch has subsequently filed lawsuits against Taylor, which is the company that makes the ice cream machines and McDonald's itself. According to a Wired article on the subject, during the discovery period of the lawsuit against Taylor, Kitch learned that the most that most of the opposition was coming straight from McDonald's, not from Taylor, but from corporate McDonald's itself. The article is well worth a read. It is titled ice cream machine hackers sue McDonald's for nine hundred million dollars. That is a heck of a headline. And finally, speaking of headlines, Business Insider reports that wings Stop, the restaurant known for chicken wings, has filed a quote trademark to sell chicken wings in the metaverse. End quote that their headline was just about enough to make me want to walk into the woods just live there. But anyway, Wingstop is not the only restaurant going through these steps. McDonald's has done it too, which leads one to wonder if ice cream machines are gonna work better in the metaverse anyway. It sounds like these trademarks include downloadable virtual goods, so presumably stuff like virtual Big Max and virtual wings I guess, or maybe virtual clothing that has logos on it. I don't know, and also it's supposed to cover things like n f t s that represent digital assets. Seriously, y'all, I cannot with this nonsense. It is making me feel like I have stepped into a parody of the real world. Anyway, there may also be ways to order, you know, real world food while you're in the metaverse, so I don't know, maybe in the future, when you want to use a delivery service to order a big Mac or Wings or something, you first have to put on VR goggles and navigate to the closest virtual restaurant or something. I hate all of this. Of course, a lot of these moves could just be hail Mary passes that the various companies are throwing all in an effort so that they don't get left behind in this crazy rush towards the metaverse, and those moves might prove to be unnecessary or misguided in the future, like it might turn out like, oh, none of is actually applicable, or maybe they'll turn out that these were really acts of genius and they have huge payoffs down the line. I honestly can't tell anymore. And that's the news. So if you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, preferably topics that do not drive me closer to the brink of insanity. Please reach out to me on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.