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 is time for the tech news for Thursday, January twenty Twin D two, the Journal of Public Health recently posted a study that shows anti vaccination groups on Facebook we're sewing the seeds of mistrust regarding COVID Night teen and COVID Night Team vaccines before there was even an organized vaccine development program from the United States government. According to the study, the groups were circulating misinformation about COVID nineteen and vaccines for COVID nineteen as early as February twenty twenty. And heck, that's before we started seeing lockdowns in various cities around the world and in the United States. I was still on vacation in February at the point where these stories were starting to circulate, and in fact, I was starting to wonder if I would ever get back home. But um, but I did. Anyway. The researchers identified the anti vax groups that were most active on Facebook at that time, and they have some pretty remarkable names. You know, names like National Vaccine Information Center, which makes it sound like it's some sort of official agency that focuses on vaccines, but in fact, it was a disinformation campaign designed to promote conspiracy theories and anti vaxx messaging and undermine confidence in vaccinations in general. Two of the other four anti vax groups that the research report named have similar names to that. One is a Vaccination Information Network and the other is Vaccine Machine. And the four groups that the researchers identified had posted around two thousand sixty times on Facebook from February twenty to May, and about half of those posts mentioned COVID nineteen. Uh, presumably the other half were just kind of more generally anti vacs. The study really pulls back the curtain on some important things. One is that misinformation campaigns really got the jump on US public health officials. Uh. Those deceptive posts came out well before we started getting you know, reliable information from organizations like the c d C, for example. Another is that this is yet more proof of how Facebook facilitates the spread of harmful information. I'm not saying that the platform creates harmful information, but definitely facilitates the spread of it, and I know I'm beating a dead horse here. I know I've talked about this countless times, but Facebook's entire business model depends upon people spreading and engaging with content on face Book. I mean that engagement is a commodity that Facebook sells to advertisers, so it financially benefits Facebook when these things happen, and it was really only after massive pressure that the company indicated it would do anything about it. In fact, that's what a lot of those internal papers that Francis Hogan leaked to the authorities and pressed indicated that when there were voices inside Facebook that we're warning about stuff like misinformation campaigns, they were often ignored or silenced. Anyway. The study is titled Faster than warp Speed Early attention to COVID nineteen by anti vaccine groups on Facebook. Warp Speed is a reference not to star Trek, although I mean indirectly yes, but more directly to the United States government's uh project to fast track vaccine development for COVID nineteen. The big news and activision blizzard this month has mostly been about how Microsoft announced it was going to acquire the company by the end of fiscal year twenty twenty three, assuming regulatory bodies around the world don't throw the deal off track. But there's more going on at that company than a big acquisition. Employees at Raven Software, which is a division within Activision Blizzard, have formed a union. Specifically, the employees I'm talking about our thirty four quality assurance or q A testers within Raven Software. They are the ones who have unionized. Now. Part of the unionization process, which I've actually seen firsthand now involves the union potentially reaching out to the company and asking that the company formally recognized the union, like essentially saying, hey, we have a threshold of employees who want to unionize. Uh. And here's maybe some union cards that people have signed that we were hoping that you will recognize this as a union uh. And and this can go a couple of ways. The company can choose to voluntarily recognize the union uh, and that process isn't necessarily straightforward. There's usually some back and forth between the company and the union organizers to determine who's actually covered by the union, etcetera. Or a company can choose to not voluntarily recognize the union, and that's the way Activision Blizzard chose. So now those QA testers at Raven are going to have to file with the National Labor Relations Board are in l RB in order to get permission to hold a union election. So the election is a more formal process. And ultimately what does is if the election passes, If if a majority of employees vote in favor of a union, that serves as evidence that they do in fact want to unionize. And should the election pass, then the n l r B will certify the union, and that means that companies are going to have to deal with union representatives for the purposes of collective bargaining for things like compensation and benefits and that kind of stuff. Raven released a statement expressing disappointment that Activision Blizzard did not voluntarily recognize their union, but expressed confidence that the outcome will still be the same, that in fact, the election will show that the employees wish to unionize. As for what this means when Microsoft takes control of Activision Blizzard, assuming that deal goes through well, Microsoft is also not known for being super enthusiastic about unionization. It's a kind way of putting it, but anyway, I just want to say I stand with the q A testers at Raven you know, solidarity. Speaking of unions, organizers at Amazon's JFK eight fulfillment center in Staten Island, New York have reached the number of signatures they need in order to hold a union election vote. The group A previously attempted this last year, but they did not get enough signatures to merit a vote on whether or not to form a union. Organizers need to secure the signatures of thirty percent of the overall workforce that express interest in doing so. Unsurprisingly, Amazon representatives have protested this whole move, and they question if the signatures that have been gathered are even legitimate. They argue that the previous attempt from last year shows that workers at the fulfillment center are not interested in organizing, and that besides, you know, quote, our employees have always had a choice of whether or not to join a union. End quote. Now part of my skepticism here, But Amazon is also the company that got a slap on the wrist in the wake of a different union vote, one that took place at a fulfillment center in Alabama. And in that case in which employees voted against forming a union, and Amazon was you know, really happy about that. The organizers alleged that Amazon reps had interfered with the election process. That action was sustained by the National Labor Relations Board and they are n l RB authorized a new vote, and that new vote has not yet happened. But essentially, you know, Amazon has a history that seems to indicate that the company is very keen on discouraging unionization. And on a related note, Amazon made headlines last year when journalists reported that the company had launched an influence campaign to make Amazon seemed like a super awesome place to work and perhaps maybe as part of that too, you know, kind of discourage dangerous ideas like unionization. Essentially, the story was that Amazon was paying employees to post on social media about how much they lived working at Amazon, and specifically, folks at warehouses and fulfillment centers were encouraged monetarily, that is, paid to post positive stories about their work experience. This program began in two thousand eighteen, during a time when folks were kind of scrutinizing Amazon's working conditions, which were reported to range from not so great to degrading and inhumane. Like, some of the stories were pretty awful. I mean, if my employer set performance targets for me that I could only meet if I were to pee in a bottle rather than take a bathroom break whenever I needed to go. I would call that dehumanizing. And I work from home, not in a warehouse, and yeah, that's the kind of stuff that was being reported out of Amazon Fulfillment centers now. The program of promoting Amazon as a great place to work consisted of more than fifty online accounts on Twitter, all using the appended title of Amazon FC Ambassador, and many of them using similar or sometimes identical content inside their posts, all of which position to Amazon is a hunky dory kind of place to work, almost like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. The strategy did not work. Folks called it out right away, and it now appears that Amazon has completely scrapped the program by the end of last year and then got to work essentially wiping away any trace that it was ever a thing. On a related note and a peek behind the scenes, I recently went through some f c C and f TC training here at work at I Heart, and that includes learning about how the FTC and the FCC set out rules regarding things like sponsored posts and and ads like content creators were obligated to indicate when something is an ad or a sponsored piece of content. We are not supposed to pass it off as if it's our genuine thoughts, if we wouldn't have done that otherwise. And you've probably seen this in online places like YouTube and Instagram and that kind of thing, where you're supposed to make it it's explicitly clear if the content you're presenting is sponsored or is an outright advertisement. Now I would not be surprised of Eventually we see similar rules applied to companies that are not directly associated with content creation, because what Amazon did would be against the rules if it were to happen on say a podcast or a radio show or television show or online videos. So, in other words, if I had done something similar to what was going on at Amazon with this promotional program, and I did not explicitly make it clear that this was a sponsored message I was sending out, I could be reliable. I could be fined an enormous amount of money, or my company could be fined an enormous amount of money. And I'm guessing that we will probably see a point where companies in general will be held to that where they are not allowed to run these kinds of campaigns without it potentially resulting in fines. I wouldn't be surprised to see that. And our last Amazon story for this episode is about the Companies Sold by Amazon program. In that program, Amazon partnered with third party vendors and then would promote and sell products from those vendors would be sold by Amazon label. So uh, the vendors would enter into an agreement with Amazon, and that agreement would include a minimum payment rate for stuff sold on Amazon, and then if sales went above that minimum, then Amazon would start taking a cut of the revenue. But the Attorney General for the state of Washington launched an investigation into Amazon and concluded that this practice was anti competitive and included illegal price fixing, and that the program was meant to push Amazon sales numbers up at the expense of independent third party vendors on the platform. Amazon subsequently discontinued the program and will pay a fee of more than two million dollars to the office of the Attorney General, and reportedly that fine will go to fund more anti trust enforcement efforts. We've got a lot more stories to cover, but before we get to that, let's take a quick break. Okay, we just came back from ads and LG announced to advertising companies this week that it would offer guaranteed outcome AD services through its connected televisions. So once you start cutting through the marketing speak, it appears that this really indicates the LG is going to offer up stuff like targeted advertising capabilities through its smart TVs. So if you buy an LG television, then you should expect more targeted ads to come through. Ads on smart televisions are not a new thing. If you have a smart TV, you're probably familiar with this. A lot of smart TVs will display an AD on say the home screen for the television or within certain menus. But LG has been particularly aggressive with ads and now is looking to step up into that targeted ad game. And according to digit A, LG will quote promise brands that their CTV that stands for a connected television video ads running on LG smart TVs meet campaign goals across multiple kpi s. KPI stands for a key performance indicators such as video completion rates. Buyers only pay if videos are played in their entirety, demographic targets, reach and frequency goals etcetera. Conversion metrics for mobile are also offered, but elements including tune in web visits, physical location visits, etcetera, won't be available for another few months end quote. And that starts to sound a bit scary to me. I mean from that, I infer that eventually LG connected televisions are going to share information with your smartphone, including any location tracking that your phone uses, and share that information with advertisers. So that let's say that you've got a company that advertises mattresses and that company then sees that the targeted customers are actually visiting brick and mortar stores that the company operates. Because the LG smart TV is sharing that location data between apps on the smartphone, the television, and the whole advertising campaign in the first place, starts to get a little invasive. Also, if we're talking targeted advertising that takes into account stuff like your browsing habits that you know it's connected to an account that is living on, say your computer or your smartphone, a lot of other red flags pop up For me. It could be a really big privacy issue. Just imagine for a second that you're living in an apartment with a whole bunch of roommates, and you might happen to own an LG smart TV and you offer to have that be the communal television in the living room space. So you're living room TV is your smart LG TV. If that television is connected to some sort of account on your smartphone or laptop, it's possible that the ads that end up being displayed are revealing information that you really didn't want to share with your roommates. Maybe it's like medical information or something. And that's just one hypothetical situation. I can imagine where this is not a good thing, but we'll have to see how it plays out. Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. It's the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and today is also when the TikTok platform will begin promoting a website called about Holocaust dot org. The World Jewish Congress and UNESCO created that site to educate people about the Holocaust and to fight back against misinformation and denial campaigns, which unfortunately proliferate across the internet. Advocacy groups have long complained that TikTok was not taking enough action to curtail anti Semitic messaging on the platform, and Holocaust denial in videos as well. In addition, several Jewish TikTok creators have reported being the target of abuse. Sometimes they've had their content mistakenly flagged or removed with no justification. And according to see net, there have been some trends on TikTok that I'm not even going to describe here because I find them deeply upsetting and very sad. But I will say they are trends that minimize or even celebrate the Holocaust, which is it turns my stomach now. I think TikTok is taking the right actions to try and push back against these trends on its platform and to make sure that people visiting TikTok have the opportunity to learn from reputable sources about the Holocaust and not allow misinformation to run unchecked. Of course, it will remain to be seen about whether or not these efforts are effective. Do you remember way back in November two thousand nineteen, when Tesla unveiled its design for the cyber truck. The reaction to that unveiling was, I'll be kind, I'll say it was mixed. Maybe part of that is because during a demonstration to show how unbreakable. The truck's windows were the windows broke? What sie? It also has a pretty funky design, do it like? Some people just absolutely hated it. A few people thought it was weird but kind of interesting. I think it's interesting, but not It doesn't look practical to me, But what do I know. I don't drive anyway. Um, and we got reports late last year that an updated design of the cyber truck was spotted driving around test tracks in Fremont. Well, the cyber truck was supposed to come out by the end of this year. Actually, I think they were supposed to start shipping late last year. That didn't happen, and now it looks like it's not gonna happen this year either, because in an earnings call yesterday, Elon Musk revealed that the production of the truck has been delayed until twenty three. He also said that the company would not be introducing any new models this year, and he also dismissed the idea that Tesla would pursue producing a low cost vehicle in the near future. He said there were no plans to design a twenty five dollar car, and he essentially said that the company doesn't really need to make a low cost car, at least not yet, because they'll end up selling every car they're able to produce. Now, you could interpret that as being boastful, right, Let's say like, oh, we don't need to have a budget car in our lineup. We don't. It doesn't matter what we charge, We're gonna sell every single car off the line, which is kind of how Musk said it. I guess, so we wouldn't be unfair to frame it that way. However, I don't really think of it as boasting. I think of it more as an indication that Tesla doesn't produce nearly as many vehicles as some of its competitors do. For example, in one Tesla said that it delivered nine thirty six thousand vehicles, so below one million, but ninety six thousand. Toyota meanwhile produced seven point six million vehicles at the end of their last fiscal year, which was at the end of last March. So if you're looking at that level of scale, to me, it makes sense that that Tesla is not focusing on low cost vehicles yet because it has not reached a scale of production where it would merit. The move to making low cost vehicles in fact, it might not even be financially feasible to make low cost vehicles right now because of those issues of the scale of production. Now as Tesla grows, that can very much change. But I think that's kind of what Well, that was my interpretation of what Elon Musk was getting at. I could be totally off base. Now here's a question. If a self driving vehicle gets into an accident, whom do you find at fault? Is it the car's owner, was it the person who was in the vehicle? Was it the car maker? Well, the Law Commission of England and Wales as well as the Scottish Law Commission released a joint report that suggests people who are you know, in an autonomous vehicle should not be held responsible for road safety issues. Instead, the car maker should be held accountable for any road safety issues that that occur because of that car. And this has been one of those areas of debate as engineers get closer to producing what we might actually call a truly autonomous vehicle. But the commissions also point out quite correctly that there is massive confusion among the general public as to what is and what is not a truly self driving car. And we were just talking about Tesla, so I'm going to use them as an example of how the public can get confused. Tesla refers to its you know, basic driver assist suite of features as auto pilot, and I would argue that sets an expectation that isn't very realistic because the word autopilot seems to suggest, at least to me, that the driver doesn't have to worry about anything because the car is an autopilot. But arguably worse than that, the company has uh the full self driving mode, which is in beta. It's not a full release yet, but I would say that's not really a full self driving mode. Even though it's called full self driving. I would say it's not full self driving. You still have to have an owner prepared to intervene and to you're not supposed to take your hands off the wheel, You're supposed to maintain your attention. That to me does not mean full self driving. So there's no wonder that the average person might have an unrealistic expectation as to what a self driving car can and cannot do. Anyway, should the UK adopt the recommendations these commissions have suggested and hold car makers accountable for any accidents that happened with their their vehicles. We could see a precedent set in which governments around the world agree that car makers are the responsible ones if self driving vehicles get into accidents. Now, personally, I think that's the most reasonable approach. Um. You know, you can even get more granular than that, if you want to argue that the department in charge of whatever part of the the self driving system was at fault really takes the blame. But I think that the car maker is the one that makes the most sense. And I think when we start talking about stuff like insurance, that's going to have to play a factor as well. Assuming we do get to a world where you know, you might own a self driving car, keeping in mind that most models I see suggest that self driving cars will actually be owned by companies that are essentially right hailing companies, not necessarily sold to individual customers. Um, but yeah, this could really set a legal precedent that we could see spread around the world. And unless we're talking about a case where a human is interfering with the autonomous operations of a car, I think that that just makes sense if you are talking about something where somebody I don't know, rests control of the car from the system. Uh, then obviously you would be in a different case, and I don't think the car maker should be held accountable in those instances. That's why I think a lot of car companies that have been kind of playing with the idea of autonomous cars have also floated the concept of vehicles that don't have controls in them, right, because then you take away at least human accessible controls them. You take away the ability for a human to like turn the wheels suddenly when it should be under the control of the car itself. Okay, we've got a few more stories to cover, but before we get to those, let's take another quick break. Block Incorporated CEO Jack Dorsey is probably sweating a little bit right now. Block inc Used to be known as Square, which is its famous product and service. You probably have encountered a Square dongle at some point. These are typically it's a device that you plug into something like an iOS device like an iPhone or tablet iPad, and it allows you to process credit card payments, and the tablet or phone acts as the communications node that then works with the back end of the credit card companies and you can use the iOS device as a point of sale, and it's very useful for small business owners. Well, Apple has recently announced that it is working on a service that will allow those small business owners to accept payments directly through their iOS devices without the need for an additional piece of hardware like a Square dongle. And so it's just saying, well, we're going to offer that as a native capability in our devices, so if you want, you can use our payment system and you don't even have to have like a Square account or anything like that. And uh, there aren't a whole lot of details here, but Bloomberg suggests that Apple is going to use NFC technology as the foundation. NFC stands for near field communication that allows for the wireless data transfer a very small packets of information across small physical distances. Like you know, you hold two phones up next to each other and they exchange contact information, that kind of thing that's that typically uses NFC, and modern credit cards typically have a chip that uses NFC for contact list payments, So for those where you can tap the card against a point of sale, those kind of things, it'll work with that, at least according to Blueberg, And it will be interesting to see how block Inc responds to this. I imagine there's going to be a battle of of his fees to try and stay competitive because usually on the back end of this, if you're a small business owner, you're having to pay a certain amount of money or surrender a certain amount per sale to fund these services. Right, So, if block inc is able to offer a more competitive fee versus Apple, then it might be able to go toe to toe, but it's too early to say here. In the United States, the Internal Revenue Service or i r S, which is already a super popular agency in this country, is poised to require taxpayers who want to use certain i r S online services to first use a third party company called i d dot me to verify their identity. And you know, it makes sense that the i r S wants a way to authenticate that a person is whom they claim to be, particularly when you're talking about stuff that relates to taxes or accessing sensitive documents that relate to a person's income. Um, you know it makes sense you want to make sure you protect all that well. I D dot me is going to require users to submit some documents to prove they are who they say they are, as well as to submit a video selfie as part of that verification process. So we're talking about facial recognition technology at play here, and for several reasons, many security and privacy advocates have criticized this announcement. For one thing, it brings a private company into the citizens interaction with the i r S, and there are worries that that alone compromises security as soon as the i r S chose to offload verification to a private, third party company. Then there are many of the same general issues we've seen with facial recognition software that we should consider. For example, we've seen time and again through various different facial recognition systems that many of them have a bias to them, and that this bias often makes them unreliable when used with people of color, or with women, or with people who are gender nonconforming uh. The critics also point out that this can create a deeper digital divide because it means that users who want to access those online services will have to have a web camera or a smartphone with a camera on it in order to be able to do the video selfie thing and to use facial recognition to prove they are who they say they are, and not everyone can afford that. Not everyone has that at their disposal, but everyone has to deal with the I R s Now. All that being said, I d dot me has claimed that it's technology has shown no bias or inherent unreliability based on skin color. Uh. I don't know that there's any independent research into that, but I d dot me says it's not the case. Uh. And they also point out that the online services where this will apply limited to just a couple of features. But um, you know one of those features is checking your account online. That sounds like a really basic action to me. Maybe I'm missing something here now. I RIS has said you can still file and pay taxes without going through the online route at all. And if you're doing that, like if you're doing it in the old fashioned paper and pencil way or paper and pen way, I guess you don't even have to worry about any of this, right. I d dot me is not at all involved with any of that side of things, and it's not a gatekeeper. Still, privacy advocates are concerned about where this is headed. And finally, let's talk about secret government agencies and how to uncover them. A researcher in Germany named Lilith Whitman says that she used an Apple air tag to prove that a German government agency called the Federal Telecommunications Service is actually a cover organization for a secret branch of the German in Terior Intelligence Agency. Whitman was working on a computer program to evaluate this telecommunication services work, and presumably that work is to help telecommunications companies in Germany, but that department turns out to have no official budget and that kind of sounds sus right. Well, Whitman looked into it further, trying to get to the real story of what the supposed department really was all about. She did online research, she made phone calls, she drove to offices or at least to what was claimed to be an office to check it out in person, and lots of other actions, uh, some of which just led to dead ends, And ultimately she deduced that the Federal Telecommunications Service is really part of Germany's Ministry of the Interior, specifically the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which is kind of similar to the FBI here in the United States, with some pretty major differences. But you know, that's kind of the realm this agency works in, and Whitman was told repeatedly that she was on the wrong track, which obviously she would be right. If she was on the right track, she would still get that message. And if she was on the wrong track, then she would also get that message. So no matter what, she would be told, you're not on the right track. So she decided to try and experiment. She mailed a package containing an Apple air tag to the supposed telecommunication agency's postal address. Now, air tags lets you track something right like, you can connect it to pretty much anything. You can attach it to a bag. And let's say that you're going through an airport and you're gonna check your luggage. You might have an air tag in your luggage so that you can make sure you know where your luggage is when you get to your destination. Maybe it doesn't pop up at at baggage retrieval and you want to find out where it is. Air tag can help you track it down. So she puts one of these inside a package, and she tracks it as it goes through the postal system, and she says that the tag went not to the supposed address of the Federal Telecommunication Service, but rather ended up being delivered to the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Cologne, Germany, and that seems to support her assertion that the Federal Telecommunication Service is just a front for the intelligence gathering agency. Now you might wonder why would she do this, Like, why would she do uncover the secrets? Why would she share that information? Well, you can bet that if a security researcher has figured this out, the quote unquote bad guys also know about it. And if the bad guys know your cover story, then you don't have a cover story, right, Like it's like you're wearing wearing a Groucho Marx glasses and calling it a disguise. So this is one of those functions that hackers fill that can easily be misinterpreted. You might say, well, why is this hacker pointing out this big gap in security? Isn't that dangerous? If the hacker says, hey, here's how I hacked into the system, isn't that dangerous? Well, for one thing, when a hacker does this, it sends the message that there is a gap insecurity, which really means there's no security at all, because you can sure as heck bet the bad guys are not going to let on that the system has flaws in it until it's too late to do anything about it. And for another thing, it really is a message to whatever the agency or organization or company or whatever it is. It's a message to them to say, hey, you're doing a bad job with your security, and if you want to do what you're doing, you've gotta do it better. So you could say that this is a way of doing quality control when it comes to gathering intelligence. Anyway, I thought it was an interesting story. I wanted to conclude with that one. Hope you are all doing well. If you have suggestions for topics that I should cover tech stuff, whether it's a company, uh, technology trend in general, a specific kind of technology and how it works, maybe it's one of the tech stuff tidbits you would like me to cover. Let me know the best way to do that is to reach out on Twitter. The handle for the show is text stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Y 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 is time for the tech news for Thursday, January twenty Twin D two, the Journal of Public Health recently posted a study that shows anti vaccination groups on Facebook we're sewing the seeds of mistrust regarding COVID Night teen and COVID Night Team vaccines before there was even an organized vaccine development program from the United States government. According to the study, the groups were circulating misinformation about COVID nineteen and vaccines for COVID nineteen as early as February twenty twenty. And heck, that's before we started seeing lockdowns in various cities around the world and in the United States. I was still on vacation in February at the point where these stories were starting to circulate, and in fact, I was starting to wonder if I would ever get back home. But um, but I did. Anyway. The researchers identified the anti vax groups that were most active on Facebook at that time, and they have some pretty remarkable names. You know, names like National Vaccine Information Center, which makes it sound like it's some sort of official agency that focuses on vaccines, but in fact, it was a disinformation campaign designed to promote conspiracy theories and anti vaxx messaging and undermine confidence in vaccinations in general. Two of the other four anti vax groups that the research report named have similar names to that. One is a Vaccination Information Network and the other is Vaccine Machine. And the four groups that the researchers identified had posted around two thousand sixty times on Facebook from February twenty to May, and about half of those posts mentioned COVID nineteen. Uh, presumably the other half were just kind of more generally anti vacs. The study really pulls back the curtain on some important things. One is that misinformation campaigns really got the jump on US public health officials. Uh. Those deceptive posts came out well before we started getting you know, reliable information from organizations like the c d C, for example. Another is that this is yet more proof of how Facebook facilitates the spread of harmful information. I'm not saying that the platform creates harmful information, but definitely facilitates the spread of it, and I know I'm beating a dead horse here. I know I've talked about this countless times, but Facebook's entire business model depends upon people spreading and engaging with content on face Book. I mean that engagement is a commodity that Facebook sells to advertisers, so it financially benefits Facebook when these things happen, and it was really only after massive pressure that the company indicated it would do anything about it. In fact, that's what a lot of those internal papers that Francis Hogan leaked to the authorities and pressed indicated that when there were voices inside Facebook that we're warning about stuff like misinformation campaigns, they were often ignored or silenced. Anyway. The study is titled Faster than warp Speed Early attention to COVID nineteen by anti vaccine groups on Facebook. Warp Speed is a reference not to star Trek, although I mean indirectly yes, but more directly to the United States government's uh project to fast track vaccine development for COVID nineteen. The big news and activision blizzard this month has mostly been about how Microsoft announced it was going to acquire the company by the end of fiscal year twenty twenty three, assuming regulatory bodies around the world don't throw the deal off track. But there's more going on at that company than a big acquisition. Employees at Raven Software, which is a division within Activision Blizzard, have formed a union. Specifically, the employees I'm talking about our thirty four quality assurance or q A testers within Raven Software. They are the ones who have unionized. Now. Part of the unionization process, which I've actually seen firsthand now involves the union potentially reaching out to the company and asking that the company formally recognized the union, like essentially saying, hey, we have a threshold of employees who want to unionize. Uh. And here's maybe some union cards that people have signed that we were hoping that you will recognize this as a union uh. And and this can go a couple of ways. The company can choose to voluntarily recognize the union uh, and that process isn't necessarily straightforward. There's usually some back and forth between the company and the union organizers to determine who's actually covered by the union, etcetera. Or a company can choose to not voluntarily recognize the union, and that's the way Activision Blizzard chose. So now those QA testers at Raven are going to have to file with the National Labor Relations Board are in l RB in order to get permission to hold a union election. So the election is a more formal process. And ultimately what does is if the election passes, If if a majority of employees vote in favor of a union, that serves as evidence that they do in fact want to unionize. And should the election pass, then the n l r B will certify the union, and that means that companies are going to have to deal with union representatives for the purposes of collective bargaining for things like compensation and benefits and that kind of stuff. Raven released a statement expressing disappointment that Activision Blizzard did not voluntarily recognize their union, but expressed confidence that the outcome will still be the same, that in fact, the election will show that the employees wish to unionize. As for what this means when Microsoft takes control of Activision Blizzard, assuming that deal goes through well, Microsoft is also not known for being super enthusiastic about unionization. It's a kind way of putting it, but anyway, I just want to say I stand with the q A testers at Raven you know, solidarity. Speaking of unions, organizers at Amazon's JFK eight fulfillment center in Staten Island, New York have reached the number of signatures they need in order to hold a union election vote. The group A previously attempted this last year, but they did not get enough signatures to merit a vote on whether or not to form a union. Organizers need to secure the signatures of thirty percent of the overall workforce that express interest in doing so. Unsurprisingly, Amazon representatives have protested this whole move, and they question if the signatures that have been gathered are even legitimate. They argue that the previous attempt from last year shows that workers at the fulfillment center are not interested in organizing, and that besides, you know, quote, our employees have always had a choice of whether or not to join a union. End quote. Now part of my skepticism here, But Amazon is also the company that got a slap on the wrist in the wake of a different union vote, one that took place at a fulfillment center in Alabama. And in that case in which employees voted against forming a union, and Amazon was you know, really happy about that. The organizers alleged that Amazon reps had interfered with the election process. That action was sustained by the National Labor Relations Board and they are n l RB authorized a new vote, and that new vote has not yet happened. But essentially, you know, Amazon has a history that seems to indicate that the company is very keen on discouraging unionization. And on a related note, Amazon made headlines last year when journalists reported that the company had launched an influence campaign to make Amazon seemed like a super awesome place to work and perhaps maybe as part of that too, you know, kind of discourage dangerous ideas like unionization. Essentially, the story was that Amazon was paying employees to post on social media about how much they lived working at Amazon, and specifically, folks at warehouses and fulfillment centers were encouraged monetarily, that is, paid to post positive stories about their work experience. This program began in two thousand eighteen, during a time when folks were kind of scrutinizing Amazon's working conditions, which were reported to range from not so great to degrading and inhumane. Like, some of the stories were pretty awful. I mean, if my employer set performance targets for me that I could only meet if I were to pee in a bottle rather than take a bathroom break whenever I needed to go. I would call that dehumanizing. And I work from home, not in a warehouse, and yeah, that's the kind of stuff that was being reported out of Amazon Fulfillment centers now. The program of promoting Amazon as a great place to work consisted of more than fifty online accounts on Twitter, all using the appended title of Amazon FC Ambassador, and many of them using similar or sometimes identical content inside their posts, all of which position to Amazon is a hunky dory kind of place to work, almost like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. The strategy did not work. Folks called it out right away, and it now appears that Amazon has completely scrapped the program by the end of last year and then got to work essentially wiping away any trace that it was ever a thing. On a related note and a peek behind the scenes, I recently went through some f c C and f TC training here at work at I Heart, and that includes learning about how the FTC and the FCC set out rules regarding things like sponsored posts and and ads like content creators were obligated to indicate when something is an ad or a sponsored piece of content. We are not supposed to pass it off as if it's our genuine thoughts, if we wouldn't have done that otherwise. And you've probably seen this in online places like YouTube and Instagram and that kind of thing, where you're supposed to make it it's explicitly clear if the content you're presenting is sponsored or is an outright advertisement. Now I would not be surprised of Eventually we see similar rules applied to companies that are not directly associated with content creation, because what Amazon did would be against the rules if it were to happen on say a podcast or a radio show or television show or online videos. So, in other words, if I had done something similar to what was going on at Amazon with this promotional program, and I did not explicitly make it clear that this was a sponsored message I was sending out, I could be reliable. I could be fined an enormous amount of money, or my company could be fined an enormous amount of money. And I'm guessing that we will probably see a point where companies in general will be held to that where they are not allowed to run these kinds of campaigns without it potentially resulting in fines. I wouldn't be surprised to see that. And our last Amazon story for this episode is about the Companies Sold by Amazon program. In that program, Amazon partnered with third party vendors and then would promote and sell products from those vendors would be sold by Amazon label. So uh, the vendors would enter into an agreement with Amazon, and that agreement would include a minimum payment rate for stuff sold on Amazon, and then if sales went above that minimum, then Amazon would start taking a cut of the revenue. But the Attorney General for the state of Washington launched an investigation into Amazon and concluded that this practice was anti competitive and included illegal price fixing, and that the program was meant to push Amazon sales numbers up at the expense of independent third party vendors on the platform. Amazon subsequently discontinued the program and will pay a fee of more than two million dollars to the office of the Attorney General, and reportedly that fine will go to fund more anti trust enforcement efforts. We've got a lot more stories to cover, but before we get to that, let's take a quick break. Okay, we just came back from ads and LG announced to advertising companies this week that it would offer guaranteed outcome AD services through its connected televisions. So once you start cutting through the marketing speak, it appears that this really indicates the LG is going to offer up stuff like targeted advertising capabilities through its smart TVs. So if you buy an LG television, then you should expect more targeted ads to come through. Ads on smart televisions are not a new thing. If you have a smart TV, you're probably familiar with this. A lot of smart TVs will display an AD on say the home screen for the television or within certain menus. But LG has been particularly aggressive with ads and now is looking to step up into that targeted ad game. And according to digit A, LG will quote promise brands that their CTV that stands for a connected television video ads running on LG smart TVs meet campaign goals across multiple kpi s. KPI stands for a key performance indicators such as video completion rates. Buyers only pay if videos are played in their entirety, demographic targets, reach and frequency goals etcetera. Conversion metrics for mobile are also offered, but elements including tune in web visits, physical location visits, etcetera, won't be available for another few months end quote. And that starts to sound a bit scary to me. I mean from that, I infer that eventually LG connected televisions are going to share information with your smartphone, including any location tracking that your phone uses, and share that information with advertisers. So that let's say that you've got a company that advertises mattresses and that company then sees that the targeted customers are actually visiting brick and mortar stores that the company operates. Because the LG smart TV is sharing that location data between apps on the smartphone, the television, and the whole advertising campaign in the first place, starts to get a little invasive. Also, if we're talking targeted advertising that takes into account stuff like your browsing habits that you know it's connected to an account that is living on, say your computer or your smartphone, a lot of other red flags pop up For me. It could be a really big privacy issue. Just imagine for a second that you're living in an apartment with a whole bunch of roommates, and you might happen to own an LG smart TV and you offer to have that be the communal television in the living room space. So you're living room TV is your smart LG TV. If that television is connected to some sort of account on your smartphone or laptop, it's possible that the ads that end up being displayed are revealing information that you really didn't want to share with your roommates. Maybe it's like medical information or something. And that's just one hypothetical situation. I can imagine where this is not a good thing, but we'll have to see how it plays out. Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. It's the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and today is also when the TikTok platform will begin promoting a website called about Holocaust dot org. The World Jewish Congress and UNESCO created that site to educate people about the Holocaust and to fight back against misinformation and denial campaigns, which unfortunately proliferate across the internet. Advocacy groups have long complained that TikTok was not taking enough action to curtail anti Semitic messaging on the platform, and Holocaust denial in videos as well. In addition, several Jewish TikTok creators have reported being the target of abuse. Sometimes they've had their content mistakenly flagged or removed with no justification. And according to see net, there have been some trends on TikTok that I'm not even going to describe here because I find them deeply upsetting and very sad. But I will say they are trends that minimize or even celebrate the Holocaust, which is it turns my stomach now. I think TikTok is taking the right actions to try and push back against these trends on its platform and to make sure that people visiting TikTok have the opportunity to learn from reputable sources about the Holocaust and not allow misinformation to run unchecked. Of course, it will remain to be seen about whether or not these efforts are effective. Do you remember way back in November two thousand nineteen, when Tesla unveiled its design for the cyber truck. The reaction to that unveiling was, I'll be kind, I'll say it was mixed. Maybe part of that is because during a demonstration to show how unbreakable. The truck's windows were the windows broke? What sie? It also has a pretty funky design, do it like? Some people just absolutely hated it. A few people thought it was weird but kind of interesting. I think it's interesting, but not It doesn't look practical to me, But what do I know. I don't drive anyway. Um, and we got reports late last year that an updated design of the cyber truck was spotted driving around test tracks in Fremont. Well, the cyber truck was supposed to come out by the end of this year. Actually, I think they were supposed to start shipping late last year. That didn't happen, and now it looks like it's not gonna happen this year either, because in an earnings call yesterday, Elon Musk revealed that the production of the truck has been delayed until twenty three. He also said that the company would not be introducing any new models this year, and he also dismissed the idea that Tesla would pursue producing a low cost vehicle in the near future. He said there were no plans to design a twenty five dollar car, and he essentially said that the company doesn't really need to make a low cost car, at least not yet, because they'll end up selling every car they're able to produce. Now, you could interpret that as being boastful, right, Let's say like, oh, we don't need to have a budget car in our lineup. We don't. It doesn't matter what we charge, We're gonna sell every single car off the line, which is kind of how Musk said it. I guess, so we wouldn't be unfair to frame it that way. However, I don't really think of it as boasting. I think of it more as an indication that Tesla doesn't produce nearly as many vehicles as some of its competitors do. For example, in one Tesla said that it delivered nine thirty six thousand vehicles, so below one million, but ninety six thousand. Toyota meanwhile produced seven point six million vehicles at the end of their last fiscal year, which was at the end of last March. So if you're looking at that level of scale, to me, it makes sense that that Tesla is not focusing on low cost vehicles yet because it has not reached a scale of production where it would merit. The move to making low cost vehicles in fact, it might not even be financially feasible to make low cost vehicles right now because of those issues of the scale of production. Now as Tesla grows, that can very much change. But I think that's kind of what Well, that was my interpretation of what Elon Musk was getting at. I could be totally off base. Now here's a question. If a self driving vehicle gets into an accident, whom do you find at fault? Is it the car's owner, was it the person who was in the vehicle? Was it the car maker? Well, the Law Commission of England and Wales as well as the Scottish Law Commission released a joint report that suggests people who are you know, in an autonomous vehicle should not be held responsible for road safety issues. Instead, the car maker should be held accountable for any road safety issues that that occur because of that car. And this has been one of those areas of debate as engineers get closer to producing what we might actually call a truly autonomous vehicle. But the commissions also point out quite correctly that there is massive confusion among the general public as to what is and what is not a truly self driving car. And we were just talking about Tesla, so I'm going to use them as an example of how the public can get confused. Tesla refers to its you know, basic driver assist suite of features as auto pilot, and I would argue that sets an expectation that isn't very realistic because the word autopilot seems to suggest, at least to me, that the driver doesn't have to worry about anything because the car is an autopilot. But arguably worse than that, the company has uh the full self driving mode, which is in beta. It's not a full release yet, but I would say that's not really a full self driving mode. Even though it's called full self driving. I would say it's not full self driving. You still have to have an owner prepared to intervene and to you're not supposed to take your hands off the wheel, You're supposed to maintain your attention. That to me does not mean full self driving. So there's no wonder that the average person might have an unrealistic expectation as to what a self driving car can and cannot do. Anyway, should the UK adopt the recommendations these commissions have suggested and hold car makers accountable for any accidents that happened with their their vehicles. We could see a precedent set in which governments around the world agree that car makers are the responsible ones if self driving vehicles get into accidents. Now, personally, I think that's the most reasonable approach. Um. You know, you can even get more granular than that, if you want to argue that the department in charge of whatever part of the the self driving system was at fault really takes the blame. But I think that the car maker is the one that makes the most sense. And I think when we start talking about stuff like insurance, that's going to have to play a factor as well. Assuming we do get to a world where you know, you might own a self driving car, keeping in mind that most models I see suggest that self driving cars will actually be owned by companies that are essentially right hailing companies, not necessarily sold to individual customers. Um, but yeah, this could really set a legal precedent that we could see spread around the world. And unless we're talking about a case where a human is interfering with the autonomous operations of a car, I think that that just makes sense if you are talking about something where somebody I don't know, rests control of the car from the system. Uh, then obviously you would be in a different case, and I don't think the car maker should be held accountable in those instances. That's why I think a lot of car companies that have been kind of playing with the idea of autonomous cars have also floated the concept of vehicles that don't have controls in them, right, because then you take away at least human accessible controls them. You take away the ability for a human to like turn the wheels suddenly when it should be under the control of the car itself. Okay, we've got a few more stories to cover, but before we get to those, let's take another quick break. Block Incorporated CEO Jack Dorsey is probably sweating a little bit right now. Block inc Used to be known as Square, which is its famous product and service. You probably have encountered a Square dongle at some point. These are typically it's a device that you plug into something like an iOS device like an iPhone or tablet iPad, and it allows you to process credit card payments, and the tablet or phone acts as the communications node that then works with the back end of the credit card companies and you can use the iOS device as a point of sale, and it's very useful for small business owners. Well, Apple has recently announced that it is working on a service that will allow those small business owners to accept payments directly through their iOS devices without the need for an additional piece of hardware like a Square dongle. And so it's just saying, well, we're going to offer that as a native capability in our devices, so if you want, you can use our payment system and you don't even have to have like a Square account or anything like that. And uh, there aren't a whole lot of details here, but Bloomberg suggests that Apple is going to use NFC technology as the foundation. NFC stands for near field communication that allows for the wireless data transfer a very small packets of information across small physical distances. Like you know, you hold two phones up next to each other and they exchange contact information, that kind of thing that's that typically uses NFC, and modern credit cards typically have a chip that uses NFC for contact list payments, So for those where you can tap the card against a point of sale, those kind of things, it'll work with that, at least according to Blueberg, And it will be interesting to see how block Inc responds to this. I imagine there's going to be a battle of of his fees to try and stay competitive because usually on the back end of this, if you're a small business owner, you're having to pay a certain amount of money or surrender a certain amount per sale to fund these services. Right, So, if block inc is able to offer a more competitive fee versus Apple, then it might be able to go toe to toe, but it's too early to say here. In the United States, the Internal Revenue Service or i r S, which is already a super popular agency in this country, is poised to require taxpayers who want to use certain i r S online services to first use a third party company called i d dot me to verify their identity. And you know, it makes sense that the i r S wants a way to authenticate that a person is whom they claim to be, particularly when you're talking about stuff that relates to taxes or accessing sensitive documents that relate to a person's income. Um, you know it makes sense you want to make sure you protect all that well. I D dot me is going to require users to submit some documents to prove they are who they say they are, as well as to submit a video selfie as part of that verification process. So we're talking about facial recognition technology at play here, and for several reasons, many security and privacy advocates have criticized this announcement. For one thing, it brings a private company into the citizens interaction with the i r S, and there are worries that that alone compromises security as soon as the i r S chose to offload verification to a private, third party company. Then there are many of the same general issues we've seen with facial recognition software that we should consider. For example, we've seen time and again through various different facial recognition systems that many of them have a bias to them, and that this bias often makes them unreliable when used with people of color, or with women, or with people who are gender nonconforming uh. The critics also point out that this can create a deeper digital divide because it means that users who want to access those online services will have to have a web camera or a smartphone with a camera on it in order to be able to do the video selfie thing and to use facial recognition to prove they are who they say they are, and not everyone can afford that. Not everyone has that at their disposal, but everyone has to deal with the I R s Now. All that being said, I d dot me has claimed that it's technology has shown no bias or inherent unreliability based on skin color. Uh. I don't know that there's any independent research into that, but I d dot me says it's not the case. Uh. And they also point out that the online services where this will apply limited to just a couple of features. But um, you know one of those features is checking your account online. That sounds like a really basic action to me. Maybe I'm missing something here now. I RIS has said you can still file and pay taxes without going through the online route at all. And if you're doing that, like if you're doing it in the old fashioned paper and pencil way or paper and pen way, I guess you don't even have to worry about any of this, right. I d dot me is not at all involved with any of that side of things, and it's not a gatekeeper. Still, privacy advocates are concerned about where this is headed. And finally, let's talk about secret government agencies and how to uncover them. A researcher in Germany named Lilith Whitman says that she used an Apple air tag to prove that a German government agency called the Federal Telecommunications Service is actually a cover organization for a secret branch of the German in Terior Intelligence Agency. Whitman was working on a computer program to evaluate this telecommunication services work, and presumably that work is to help telecommunications companies in Germany, but that department turns out to have no official budget and that kind of sounds sus right. Well, Whitman looked into it further, trying to get to the real story of what the supposed department really was all about. She did online research, she made phone calls, she drove to offices or at least to what was claimed to be an office to check it out in person, and lots of other actions, uh, some of which just led to dead ends, And ultimately she deduced that the Federal Telecommunications Service is really part of Germany's Ministry of the Interior, specifically the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which is kind of similar to the FBI here in the United States, with some pretty major differences. But you know, that's kind of the realm this agency works in, and Whitman was told repeatedly that she was on the wrong track, which obviously she would be right. If she was on the right track, she would still get that message. And if she was on the wrong track, then she would also get that message. So no matter what, she would be told, you're not on the right track. So she decided to try and experiment. She mailed a package containing an Apple air tag to the supposed telecommunication agency's postal address. Now, air tags lets you track something right like, you can connect it to pretty much anything. You can attach it to a bag. And let's say that you're going through an airport and you're gonna check your luggage. You might have an air tag in your luggage so that you can make sure you know where your luggage is when you get to your destination. Maybe it doesn't pop up at at baggage retrieval and you want to find out where it is. Air tag can help you track it down. So she puts one of these inside a package, and she tracks it as it goes through the postal system, and she says that the tag went not to the supposed address of the Federal Telecommunication Service, but rather ended up being delivered to the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Cologne, Germany, and that seems to support her assertion that the Federal Telecommunication Service is just a front for the intelligence gathering agency. Now you might wonder why would she do this, Like, why would she do uncover the secrets? Why would she share that information? Well, you can bet that if a security researcher has figured this out, the quote unquote bad guys also know about it. And if the bad guys know your cover story, then you don't have a cover story, right, Like it's like you're wearing wearing a Groucho Marx glasses and calling it a disguise. So this is one of those functions that hackers fill that can easily be misinterpreted. You might say, well, why is this hacker pointing out this big gap in security? Isn't that dangerous? If the hacker says, hey, here's how I hacked into the system, isn't that dangerous? Well, for one thing, when a hacker does this, it sends the message that there is a gap insecurity, which really means there's no security at all, because you can sure as heck bet the bad guys are not going to let on that the system has flaws in it until it's too late to do anything about it. And for another thing, it really is a message to whatever the agency or organization or company or whatever it is. It's a message to them to say, hey, you're doing a bad job with your security, and if you want to do what you're doing, you've gotta do it better. So you could say that this is a way of doing quality control when it comes to gathering intelligence. Anyway, I thought it was an interesting story. I wanted to conclude with that one. Hope you are all doing well. If you have suggestions for topics that I should cover tech stuff, whether it's a company, uh, technology trend in general, a specific kind of technology and how it works, maybe it's one of the tech stuff tidbits you would like me to cover. Let me know the best way to do that is to reach out on Twitter. The handle for the show is text stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Y 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.