Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for Thursday, April six, twenty twenty three. Earlier this week, I talked about how Germany is considering a ban on open ais chat GPT out of privacy concerns following Italy's move to do just that very thing. Italy has issued essentially a ban and Germany's considering the same sort of thing. Well. Today, open Ai is scheduled to present Italian regulators a plan to address their concerns and to essentially patch some vulnerabilities in an effort to get that band lifted and perhaps prevent a domino effect throughout the rest of the European Union. As I mentioned in Tuesday's episode, the concerns here really have nothing to do with chat GPT's reliability as an information source, So this isn't concern about misinformation or anything like that, or plagiarism. It's rather how open ai and Microsoft handle user data and privacy, and it's also meant to ensure that underage users are unable to access the tool, and again this is a get due to the sensitive nature of their personal information. So it's more about how our companies like open ai and Microsoft getting EU citizen information and how are they using it, and they want to make sure that all of that is by the regulations of the EU. We've known that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has been working on its own AI. The company has already made its large language model called LAMA available to academics, and at least one of those academics subsequent leaked the code to get hub. Now. The financial newspaper Nica Asia reports that Meta is preparing to launch a commercial AI product using generative language features by the end of this year, so something similar to Google Bard or Chat GPT. This doesn't necessarily mean that the average Meta user will have direct interactions with this generative AI. Rather, one potential use could be totally behind the scenes, with the AI helping Meta's advertising division to work with clients to create more effective ad campaigns. Maybe you've seen what amounts to be the exact same ad, but the ad itself is clearly geared for different demographics. I'm reminded of seeing the same commercial in English and Spanish. It was the exact same commercial with the same beats and everything, but it did have a totally different cast for the English version that from the Spanish one. It's just that they were both working from the exact same script. That's the sort of stuff that AI might help with. It might help craft approaches that it calculates will be most effective depending upon the audience. So an AI version of this might actually not use the exact same script. It might use a different script that the AI has calculated will be more effective for the intended viewer. Further off, a potential use of this AI might come in handy for Meta's version of the metaverse. I think this one is probably a bit more blue sky as it stands, but the article mentions the use of describing a virtual landscape that you have in mind and the AI can help craft it for you. So instead of you having to go through the trouble of learning how to use the graphics tools or programming or whatever the UI is for that meta space, you just tell the AI what you want and it makes it kind of like your own genie. Of course, that's only gonna matter if anyone actually wants to go to the metaverse. We'll chat more about that later in this episode. Anyway, it will be interesting to see if Meta does indeed launch these or other commercialized applications involving AI, particularly because the conversation around AI has been getting a little bit spicy lately. People have started to say we should pump the brakes on AI, and I'm wondering, how is that going to impact initiatives like this one. It might not. The initial thoughts of using it to help with advertising seem like it would be less obvious to the average person and therefore might slip under the radar and be considered perfectly fine. We'll have to wait and see. Speaking of Meta and AI, yesterday, the company showed off its segment Anything model, or sam This model can apparently identify objects in videos and still images, even if the model had never been trained on those particular objects. I'm not sure how the heck that works, but that's how Reuters reported it. The Reuters report also mentions that there were a few ways to interact with the model. So for example, you might have a picture opened up and you've got the sam AI agent active. At the same time, you could ask it to outline something specific in the picture. So, for example, maybe it's a college dorm room and you tell Sam, hey, can you outline the pizza in this picture, which, of course, as we all know, will be stuck to the ceiling or whatever. Anyway, Sam would then draw a little rectangle around the item in question once it identified it in the picture. This technology is in some ways an extension of stuff that Meta has been doing for years, like identifying specific people in photo. Admittedly, it has been a while since I've been on Facebook, but I do remember uploading images and then immediately seeing suggestions for tagging people in my pictures because Facebook was helpfully letting me know that it knows what all of my friends look like. Well, now Facebook is essentially telling me that it knows what everything looks like. I bet nothing can go wrong there. Finance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, continues to be at the center of scrutiny. Most recently, the company has shut down its derivative businesses in Australia after the country essentially revoked Binance's financial services license there. Now. This is due to an ongoing probe in which Binance apparently miscategorized some retail investors as wholesale investors, and you might be left saying, well, wait, so they lost their financial services license over what could have been a clerical error. Here's the rub. See, Australian law provides greater protections for retail investors. For the average person who's investing, the government protects them more because they don't have the same resources that a company investor would have. Right so the government steps in and says the investor deserves some protection. So the country's regulators are pointing out that Binance was possibly categorizing investors as wholesale in an effort to bypass that higher level of protection. Australians will still be able to engage with the exchange, so people who have money in crypto and they live in Australia will still be able to use Binance for that purpose. However, Binance will not be allowed to create derivative businesses in Australia for at least the near term. The collapse of FTX continues to have a massive impact beyond the crypt world. You might remember FTX was the second largest crypto exchange before things went pair shaped toward the end of last year, and one of the things that did early last year before everything went totally bonkers, was it established a philanthropic agency called the FTX Foundation. This foundation would issue grants to various applicants for all sorts of stuff. Well, since FTX went belly up last year, that funding source has been cut off. And worse than that, some folks who have received grants are now scrambling to try and pay that money back before it becomes legally mandated that they do so. And as you might imagine, this has had a huge impact on various research projects as well as independent researchers. This includes students who have since had to drop out of school because the foundation was funding their education and that money is gone. Routers has a whole piece about this. It's a pretty sad story if you want to read more about it. And it really isn't the fault of these researchers and students. It's not the fault of the people who receive the grants. It's not the fault of the people who gave the grants. The group that was put in charge of the FTX Foundation appeared to have been sincere in their efforts to help fund these projects. The problem was that FTX was engaged in shenanigans. And while you would say the people who receive the grants aren't at fault and they should not be penalized, you also have to think about the customers of FTX who saw their investments mishandled and essentially stripped away from them, and that they deserve to have as much of their money returned to them as they possibly can. And unfortunately that also means the money that had been directed toward foundation efforts. It is an ugly, ugly situation. Well, before things get uglier, let's take a quick break. We're back the verges. J Peters, who actually wrote a couple of articles we'll be talking about today. He has an article that argues it might just be the absolute worst time for Apple to jump into the mixed reality space, and I'm inclined to agree. You might remember that everyone expects Apple to announce its mixed reality headset. It's a VR slash AR headset, a far cry from the original concept of a pair of eyeglasses that were capable of handling AAR functionality. This is more of your standard, you know, headset with a full display in front of it. It's yeah, it's a rough times Peter's points out the market for high end VR headsets isn't exactly taking off like a rocket right now, where sales are pretty bad. Whether it's Meta's Quest Pro, which originally had the staggering price tag of fifteen hundred dollars, which, to be fair, is only half of what we expect Apple's headset to cost. Also, Meta has since slashed that price down to a thousand dollars, all the way down to Sony's VR setup for the PS five. That demand just hasn't pulled through either. It hasn't been there. There have been modest sales of lower priced VR headsets, but they have been really modest. On top of that, CNBC reports that research firm Piper Sanders surveyed teens who had VR headsets and found that only four percent of them would use their headsets daily and fourteen percent would use them once a week. That's not great like those numbers. That's you know, you're talking about the people who have already bought a headset and they're not using it that frequently. That's that's bad news for a lot of companies right now. And worse than that is that both of those numbers are taken out of the teens who actually have a VR headset, and they only make up twenty nine percent of all the teens that were surveyed for this research. So the other way to think about this is that less than a third of all the teens surveyed in this project own a VR headset. Out of them, only four percent of that twenty nine percent use it every day. Yikes. I don't find this really surprising personally, but that's due to two really big factors. One is that VR tends to be expensive. There are lower cost headsets out there, and some of them are pretty good, although you know, you often need to have a really decent computer to run the software, so even if the headset isn't that expensive, you might need an expensive computer to really make the most out of it. And you're still talking about hundreds of dollars or even a cheap headset. And while a team might save up for a phone, you know, a lot of smartphones cost around a thousand dollars. That's really expensive. But a phone is something you can carry with you wherever you go and you can use it pretty much anytime, whereas a VR headset is only a sometimes technology. To paraphrase, cookie monster. So it's a really big thing to ask a consumer to hand over several hundred bucks or more for some technology that they're only occasionally going to use. Despite the efforts of companies like Microsoft and Meta trying to convince us that the future is virtual. By the way, I find it really fascinating that you have companies that are pushing for this vision of the future where we're going to interact with one another in a virtual realm. Meanwhile, those very same companies are requiring employees to come back into the office to work there because they don't want them to work remotely. That seems like a mixed message to me, does it. Not like they're saying, Hey, the virtual world, that's gonna be amazing. Everyone's gonna want to work there. You're gonna want these devices because it's going to make work better, but you need to come into the office disconnect there anyway. That's one big factor is just the cost of these things. I think that's a big barrier to entry. But the other one is content. Now, there are some truly great VR experiences out there, but there's not an overabundance of them. The library for really good VR experiences is fairly thin, and this actually creates a catch twenty two situation. Developers are not eager to jump into creating really good VR experiences because they're not likely to make back their investment because the installed base for VR is pretty small. But the install base is small in part because there's a lack of content, so this sort of perpetuates itself anyway, long story short, I remain skeptical that VR is going to emerge from being a niche technology and become a mainstream tech for the common consumer, at least in the near term. If it does happen, it's going to take a lot more time, and that's probably going to take even more steam out of a lot of metaverse projects that are also connected to this concept of VR and AAR. And we've already been seeing cutbacks to metaverse divisions as companies look to control costs. So I think the metaverse quest in general is taking a really massive hit right now. Not all metaverse projects involve VR or AR. A lot of them do, but not all of them do, but I think pretty much all of them have had the rug pulled out from under them. Google has updated its developer policy for Android. It will require developers to make it easier for users to delete all their personal data off the respective apps, companies, services, should they choose to do so so. Before Google required developers to make it possible to delete an account. This was a prerequisite for having an app on the Google Play Store. So not only could you delete the app off your phone, which would remove the app from your phone, but it wouldn't magically delete your account with that app. Developer. Now you would be able to actually go and say, hey, take out my account entirely, delete the account, delete all the information you have on me. That was something Google had already demanded the developers supply. However, they didn't have any rules in place about how developers could implement that policy, which meant a oliper could have made it possible, but really bloody annoying to delete an account. So you know, you can make it a standard practice that if you wanted to remove your app, sure you could uninstall it, but if you wanted to delete your account, you had to contact the developer and request a manual deletion, and a lot of people just don't go to that step. Now Google is saying that developers will have to include a way for users to initiate account and data deletion online or from within the app itself. So that way, if you find out, say that the recipe app you've been using, has been secretly selling your information to China, you could hit self destruct on your account and your data while also uninstalling the app, and hopefully that's exactly what would then happen. It's a good step toward consumer protection, but it is unclear how Google plans to actually enforce these policies and to make sure that developers actually follow the rules. I mean, you might have a button that says delete my account, and the developer says your account has been deleted, and nothing actually happened. So how does Google make certain that the developer is following through on the policy. Hopefully this will get sorted out and it doesn't just become something that Google can point to and say, but we told them it's against the rules, so it's not our fault. You can tell that I don't have a whole lot of faith in this kind of stuff. Earlier I mentioned an article by j Peters of The Virgin I said he was going to come up again, and here it is. Mister Peters has been a busy Little Bee this week. Yesterday The Verge published a piece written by Peters about his experiences at fashion week. I mean, to be more specific, Metaverse fashion Week held at decentra Land and if you want a scathing indictment of the metaverse concept in general and decentral Lands history in particular, you have got to watch the video. The future is a ed mole Decentraland and the Metaverse by Folding Ideas. I've recommended the Folding Ideas channel before. He did a really fascinating piece about NFTs. He's talked about the crypto world. It's funny because he started off really being a channel that analyzed it, dived into deep analysis of film and television and narratives, and now he's tackling everything and his work is truly it's phenomenal. At Peter's of The Verge, he also mentions this specific video in his own coverage, and his experience and the video from Folding Ideas both paint a fairly bleak or at least bland image of the metaverse, rather than a virtual world teeming with cool avatars doing six stunts while daft punk is playing in the background. It sounds like most of the experience is pretty empty, like there are virtual landmarks and stuff, but not that many people populating it, and the avatars you do see can often just be standing idle. Maybe they're logged in just for the purposes of being logged in, possibly to accrue some sort of credit in the process, kind of like those time wasting games that you have where you make a turn and then it says you have to wait five minutes for your next turn. Maybe that's kind of what's happening. Peter says that the Metaverse Fashion Week quote felt kind of like a County fair end quote with its layout, so you could actually wander from booth to booth and check things out. Peter said most of the spaces weren't very interesting, and the bits that were meant to be interactive frequently didn't work well, if at all, so it could be a frustrating experience. And yeah, you could look at virtual fashion and potentially even purchase some with in world currency so that your avatar could wear a bespoke virtual fur code or something, but it wasn't you know, it didn't come across as a ringing endorsement of the Metaverse in general, or at least decentral Lands version of it. Folding Ideas found similar issues when exploring decentral Land in general, including issues with collision detection, which made it all but impossible to you know, like climb a staircase to go to our virtual building's second floor or you know, first floor if you happen to be in England or something. Peter said the only time he really saw users interacting with one another was at the closing party for Fashion Week, when quote dozens of avatars grooved on a virtual dance floor as a video of a human DJ played on a big screen. End quote. Based on Peters's article and the Folding Ideas video, which again Peter's also references in the article, the current incarnation of the Metaverse, or at least decentral Lands version of the Metaverse, is pretty boring. Decentral Land, by the way, is one of the groups that has abandoned plans to incorporate VR into its version of the Metaverse, So instead of going with a virtual reality approach, which is sort of what Meta has been hinting at, they're looking at going with the third person avatar approach, similar to what you would see in a massively multiplayer online role playing game. So maybe it's unfair to say that the metaverse is kind of pointless and boring. Maybe you could argue we're still a year or two out from being able to see stuff that's really compelling beyond narrow use cases. That's entirely possible. But even if that is the case, there is a lot of work that has to be done to make the metaverse something interesting enough for me to want to check it out beyond say, you know, checking out a curiosity. Like if one of my favorite bands was going to do a virtual concert, I might check that out because I like the band and I might be enjoy being able to hear them play a set, even though I wouldn't actually be there in person. I might check that out. But I can't imagine going to the metaverse just to go and that. Until that changes, I think the metaverse is kind of at a non starter for me. Okay, we got a few more stories to cover before we get to that. Let's take one more break. We're back. Vietnam has joined the list of countries currently investigating TikTok So. In this case, Vietnam's government says that this investigation is to ensure that TikTok is complying with laws and regulations, and also that you know, it's paying its proper taxes. Plus there are some concerns about content, with government official Lee Kuangtudo saying quote the platform needs to aid by local regulations on both content and tax obligations end quote. And also that some content on TikTok was quote toxic, offensive, false, and superstitious end quote, which yeah, I mean that's true, But then there's also a lot of that kind of stuff on pretty much every single platform that allows for user generated content on it. But I do get it. TikTok is built in such a way that bad content can go viral awfully fast, and next thing you know, people are watching videos that convince them to try stupid, dangerous stuff, or they're watching videos that contain blatant lies that are being passed off as fact. And if you trust TikTok more than you know a credible source, you're bound to get into trouble. Previously, upon the request of Vietnam's government, TikTok removed one point seven million videos off the platform. This was just toward the end of last year. So we'll see if there's going to be a similar purge. In the wake of this new investigation, Toyota appears to be ready to dive into electric vehicle development with real fervor after years of resisting it. According to Reuters, the company has long leaned on alternatives to pure electric vehicles, including fuel cell vehicles and hybrids. The general perception in the car world that I have picked up on is that Toyota's really dragged its feet when it comes to electric vehicles and really tried to push hard for different approaches. But after a massive change in leadership, including a new CEO, the company now appears to be repositioning to focus seriously on electric vehicles. Whether or not Toyota can make up for a lost time remains to be seen. The company is definitely behind its competitors when it comes to creating the infrastructure needed to build electric vehicles apidly at scale, but better late than never. Sometimes international law enforcement activities get badass mission names. Such is the case with a recent operation that seized the Genesis market, an online market that catered to hackers and data thieves and other na'er duells. So what was the operation's name? Operation Cookie Monster? That's right, I referenced cookie Monster twice in this news episode. Apparently, the sting operation included two hundred eight property searches and one hundred nineteen arrests. Yowza Ours Technical reports that while the public facing web page was taken down, the dark web version is still up. If you were to use tour and to navigate to this marketplaces Onion based dark web website, you could actually still go there. So this suggests that the International Law Enforcement Group has not seized all of the assets held by this particular organization, so there's still work to be done. Apparently most of the activity on this hacker market involved the buying and selling of private information. There were around fifty nine thousand registered users on the site yikes, and that they were using tools that were doing things like creating a simulation of your browsers. So if your machine had been one of the ones compromised, someone could potentially be looking at what you're looking at in real time as you use the browser and be able to do things like logyear passwords and things of that nature, real fun stuff. So yeah, it's a good thing that it got seized, but obviously without the dark web assets being turned off, you know, that there's still more to be done. Finally, are you lonely and also are you flush with cash? And are you tired of dating poor people? Well, I have potentially good news for you. Tender is contemplating a service currently referenced as tender Vault, and this would let lonesome folks who have deep pockets find others who are like themselves. So, according to Yahoo Life, tender Vault would cost five hundred dollars a month, though you could pay up front for a year and save yourself some dough then it would just be five grand for the whole year, and in return, you would have your tender profile boosted. Plus you'd be able to look for other folks who had also joined tender Vault. So in other words, you could sort your searches so that you're only looking for other people who also spent five hundred bucks a month to be part of this group. So all the snooty rich people can make certain they could avoid all the innokds that stands for not all kind, dear, and then they could avoid the rest of us, you know, the unwashed peasants just trying to find love or a hook up. Personally, I wonder if those boosted profiles will be viewable by the general public, and if they will see that it's a profile belonging to a Tinder Vault user, because I could definitely see a rise in searches for a brand new sugar Daddy or sugar mommy year or whatever. Ain't love grand or maybe five grand a year. Okay, that's it for this episode of tech Stuff. Hope you are all well. If you'd like to reach out to me, you can do so by sending me a message on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech stuff HSW or you can drop me a line by using the little microphone icon on the tech Stuff page in the iHeartRadio app. It's free to downloads free to use. Just tap that little microphone you leave a voice message up to thirty seconds. I'm link and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for Thursday, April six, twenty twenty three. Earlier this week, I talked about how Germany is considering a ban on open ais chat GPT out of privacy concerns following Italy's move to do just that very thing. Italy has issued essentially a ban and Germany's considering the same sort of thing. Well. Today, open Ai is scheduled to present Italian regulators a plan to address their concerns and to essentially patch some vulnerabilities in an effort to get that band lifted and perhaps prevent a domino effect throughout the rest of the European Union. As I mentioned in Tuesday's episode, the concerns here really have nothing to do with chat GPT's reliability as an information source, So this isn't concern about misinformation or anything like that, or plagiarism. It's rather how open ai and Microsoft handle user data and privacy, and it's also meant to ensure that underage users are unable to access the tool, and again this is a get due to the sensitive nature of their personal information. So it's more about how our companies like open ai and Microsoft getting EU citizen information and how are they using it, and they want to make sure that all of that is by the regulations of the EU. We've known that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has been working on its own AI. The company has already made its large language model called LAMA available to academics, and at least one of those academics subsequent leaked the code to get hub. Now. The financial newspaper Nica Asia reports that Meta is preparing to launch a commercial AI product using generative language features by the end of this year, so something similar to Google Bard or Chat GPT. This doesn't necessarily mean that the average Meta user will have direct interactions with this generative AI. Rather, one potential use could be totally behind the scenes, with the AI helping Meta's advertising division to work with clients to create more effective ad campaigns. Maybe you've seen what amounts to be the exact same ad, but the ad itself is clearly geared for different demographics. I'm reminded of seeing the same commercial in English and Spanish. It was the exact same commercial with the same beats and everything, but it did have a totally different cast for the English version that from the Spanish one. It's just that they were both working from the exact same script. That's the sort of stuff that AI might help with. It might help craft approaches that it calculates will be most effective depending upon the audience. So an AI version of this might actually not use the exact same script. It might use a different script that the AI has calculated will be more effective for the intended viewer. Further off, a potential use of this AI might come in handy for Meta's version of the metaverse. I think this one is probably a bit more blue sky as it stands, but the article mentions the use of describing a virtual landscape that you have in mind and the AI can help craft it for you. So instead of you having to go through the trouble of learning how to use the graphics tools or programming or whatever the UI is for that meta space, you just tell the AI what you want and it makes it kind of like your own genie. Of course, that's only gonna matter if anyone actually wants to go to the metaverse. We'll chat more about that later in this episode. Anyway, it will be interesting to see if Meta does indeed launch these or other commercialized applications involving AI, particularly because the conversation around AI has been getting a little bit spicy lately. People have started to say we should pump the brakes on AI, and I'm wondering, how is that going to impact initiatives like this one. It might not. The initial thoughts of using it to help with advertising seem like it would be less obvious to the average person and therefore might slip under the radar and be considered perfectly fine. We'll have to wait and see. Speaking of Meta and AI, yesterday, the company showed off its segment Anything model, or sam This model can apparently identify objects in videos and still images, even if the model had never been trained on those particular objects. I'm not sure how the heck that works, but that's how Reuters reported it. The Reuters report also mentions that there were a few ways to interact with the model. So for example, you might have a picture opened up and you've got the sam AI agent active. At the same time, you could ask it to outline something specific in the picture. So, for example, maybe it's a college dorm room and you tell Sam, hey, can you outline the pizza in this picture, which, of course, as we all know, will be stuck to the ceiling or whatever. Anyway, Sam would then draw a little rectangle around the item in question once it identified it in the picture. This technology is in some ways an extension of stuff that Meta has been doing for years, like identifying specific people in photo. Admittedly, it has been a while since I've been on Facebook, but I do remember uploading images and then immediately seeing suggestions for tagging people in my pictures because Facebook was helpfully letting me know that it knows what all of my friends look like. Well, now Facebook is essentially telling me that it knows what everything looks like. I bet nothing can go wrong there. Finance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, continues to be at the center of scrutiny. Most recently, the company has shut down its derivative businesses in Australia after the country essentially revoked Binance's financial services license there. Now. This is due to an ongoing probe in which Binance apparently miscategorized some retail investors as wholesale investors, and you might be left saying, well, wait, so they lost their financial services license over what could have been a clerical error. Here's the rub. See, Australian law provides greater protections for retail investors. For the average person who's investing, the government protects them more because they don't have the same resources that a company investor would have. Right so the government steps in and says the investor deserves some protection. So the country's regulators are pointing out that Binance was possibly categorizing investors as wholesale in an effort to bypass that higher level of protection. Australians will still be able to engage with the exchange, so people who have money in crypto and they live in Australia will still be able to use Binance for that purpose. However, Binance will not be allowed to create derivative businesses in Australia for at least the near term. The collapse of FTX continues to have a massive impact beyond the crypt world. You might remember FTX was the second largest crypto exchange before things went pair shaped toward the end of last year, and one of the things that did early last year before everything went totally bonkers, was it established a philanthropic agency called the FTX Foundation. This foundation would issue grants to various applicants for all sorts of stuff. Well, since FTX went belly up last year, that funding source has been cut off. And worse than that, some folks who have received grants are now scrambling to try and pay that money back before it becomes legally mandated that they do so. And as you might imagine, this has had a huge impact on various research projects as well as independent researchers. This includes students who have since had to drop out of school because the foundation was funding their education and that money is gone. Routers has a whole piece about this. It's a pretty sad story if you want to read more about it. And it really isn't the fault of these researchers and students. It's not the fault of the people who receive the grants. It's not the fault of the people who gave the grants. The group that was put in charge of the FTX Foundation appeared to have been sincere in their efforts to help fund these projects. The problem was that FTX was engaged in shenanigans. And while you would say the people who receive the grants aren't at fault and they should not be penalized, you also have to think about the customers of FTX who saw their investments mishandled and essentially stripped away from them, and that they deserve to have as much of their money returned to them as they possibly can. And unfortunately that also means the money that had been directed toward foundation efforts. It is an ugly, ugly situation. Well, before things get uglier, let's take a quick break. We're back the verges. J Peters, who actually wrote a couple of articles we'll be talking about today. He has an article that argues it might just be the absolute worst time for Apple to jump into the mixed reality space, and I'm inclined to agree. You might remember that everyone expects Apple to announce its mixed reality headset. It's a VR slash AR headset, a far cry from the original concept of a pair of eyeglasses that were capable of handling AAR functionality. This is more of your standard, you know, headset with a full display in front of it. It's yeah, it's a rough times Peter's points out the market for high end VR headsets isn't exactly taking off like a rocket right now, where sales are pretty bad. Whether it's Meta's Quest Pro, which originally had the staggering price tag of fifteen hundred dollars, which, to be fair, is only half of what we expect Apple's headset to cost. Also, Meta has since slashed that price down to a thousand dollars, all the way down to Sony's VR setup for the PS five. That demand just hasn't pulled through either. It hasn't been there. There have been modest sales of lower priced VR headsets, but they have been really modest. On top of that, CNBC reports that research firm Piper Sanders surveyed teens who had VR headsets and found that only four percent of them would use their headsets daily and fourteen percent would use them once a week. That's not great like those numbers. That's you know, you're talking about the people who have already bought a headset and they're not using it that frequently. That's that's bad news for a lot of companies right now. And worse than that is that both of those numbers are taken out of the teens who actually have a VR headset, and they only make up twenty nine percent of all the teens that were surveyed for this research. So the other way to think about this is that less than a third of all the teens surveyed in this project own a VR headset. Out of them, only four percent of that twenty nine percent use it every day. Yikes. I don't find this really surprising personally, but that's due to two really big factors. One is that VR tends to be expensive. There are lower cost headsets out there, and some of them are pretty good, although you know, you often need to have a really decent computer to run the software, so even if the headset isn't that expensive, you might need an expensive computer to really make the most out of it. And you're still talking about hundreds of dollars or even a cheap headset. And while a team might save up for a phone, you know, a lot of smartphones cost around a thousand dollars. That's really expensive. But a phone is something you can carry with you wherever you go and you can use it pretty much anytime, whereas a VR headset is only a sometimes technology. To paraphrase, cookie monster. So it's a really big thing to ask a consumer to hand over several hundred bucks or more for some technology that they're only occasionally going to use. Despite the efforts of companies like Microsoft and Meta trying to convince us that the future is virtual. By the way, I find it really fascinating that you have companies that are pushing for this vision of the future where we're going to interact with one another in a virtual realm. Meanwhile, those very same companies are requiring employees to come back into the office to work there because they don't want them to work remotely. That seems like a mixed message to me, does it. Not like they're saying, Hey, the virtual world, that's gonna be amazing. Everyone's gonna want to work there. You're gonna want these devices because it's going to make work better, but you need to come into the office disconnect there anyway. That's one big factor is just the cost of these things. I think that's a big barrier to entry. But the other one is content. Now, there are some truly great VR experiences out there, but there's not an overabundance of them. The library for really good VR experiences is fairly thin, and this actually creates a catch twenty two situation. Developers are not eager to jump into creating really good VR experiences because they're not likely to make back their investment because the installed base for VR is pretty small. But the install base is small in part because there's a lack of content, so this sort of perpetuates itself anyway, long story short, I remain skeptical that VR is going to emerge from being a niche technology and become a mainstream tech for the common consumer, at least in the near term. If it does happen, it's going to take a lot more time, and that's probably going to take even more steam out of a lot of metaverse projects that are also connected to this concept of VR and AAR. And we've already been seeing cutbacks to metaverse divisions as companies look to control costs. So I think the metaverse quest in general is taking a really massive hit right now. Not all metaverse projects involve VR or AR. A lot of them do, but not all of them do, but I think pretty much all of them have had the rug pulled out from under them. Google has updated its developer policy for Android. It will require developers to make it easier for users to delete all their personal data off the respective apps, companies, services, should they choose to do so so. Before Google required developers to make it possible to delete an account. This was a prerequisite for having an app on the Google Play Store. So not only could you delete the app off your phone, which would remove the app from your phone, but it wouldn't magically delete your account with that app. Developer. Now you would be able to actually go and say, hey, take out my account entirely, delete the account, delete all the information you have on me. That was something Google had already demanded the developers supply. However, they didn't have any rules in place about how developers could implement that policy, which meant a oliper could have made it possible, but really bloody annoying to delete an account. So you know, you can make it a standard practice that if you wanted to remove your app, sure you could uninstall it, but if you wanted to delete your account, you had to contact the developer and request a manual deletion, and a lot of people just don't go to that step. Now Google is saying that developers will have to include a way for users to initiate account and data deletion online or from within the app itself. So that way, if you find out, say that the recipe app you've been using, has been secretly selling your information to China, you could hit self destruct on your account and your data while also uninstalling the app, and hopefully that's exactly what would then happen. It's a good step toward consumer protection, but it is unclear how Google plans to actually enforce these policies and to make sure that developers actually follow the rules. I mean, you might have a button that says delete my account, and the developer says your account has been deleted, and nothing actually happened. So how does Google make certain that the developer is following through on the policy. Hopefully this will get sorted out and it doesn't just become something that Google can point to and say, but we told them it's against the rules, so it's not our fault. You can tell that I don't have a whole lot of faith in this kind of stuff. Earlier I mentioned an article by j Peters of The Virgin I said he was going to come up again, and here it is. Mister Peters has been a busy Little Bee this week. Yesterday The Verge published a piece written by Peters about his experiences at fashion week. I mean, to be more specific, Metaverse fashion Week held at decentra Land and if you want a scathing indictment of the metaverse concept in general and decentral Lands history in particular, you have got to watch the video. The future is a ed mole Decentraland and the Metaverse by Folding Ideas. I've recommended the Folding Ideas channel before. He did a really fascinating piece about NFTs. He's talked about the crypto world. It's funny because he started off really being a channel that analyzed it, dived into deep analysis of film and television and narratives, and now he's tackling everything and his work is truly it's phenomenal. At Peter's of The Verge, he also mentions this specific video in his own coverage, and his experience and the video from Folding Ideas both paint a fairly bleak or at least bland image of the metaverse, rather than a virtual world teeming with cool avatars doing six stunts while daft punk is playing in the background. It sounds like most of the experience is pretty empty, like there are virtual landmarks and stuff, but not that many people populating it, and the avatars you do see can often just be standing idle. Maybe they're logged in just for the purposes of being logged in, possibly to accrue some sort of credit in the process, kind of like those time wasting games that you have where you make a turn and then it says you have to wait five minutes for your next turn. Maybe that's kind of what's happening. Peter says that the Metaverse Fashion Week quote felt kind of like a County fair end quote with its layout, so you could actually wander from booth to booth and check things out. Peter said most of the spaces weren't very interesting, and the bits that were meant to be interactive frequently didn't work well, if at all, so it could be a frustrating experience. And yeah, you could look at virtual fashion and potentially even purchase some with in world currency so that your avatar could wear a bespoke virtual fur code or something, but it wasn't you know, it didn't come across as a ringing endorsement of the Metaverse in general, or at least decentral Lands version of it. Folding Ideas found similar issues when exploring decentral Land in general, including issues with collision detection, which made it all but impossible to you know, like climb a staircase to go to our virtual building's second floor or you know, first floor if you happen to be in England or something. Peter said the only time he really saw users interacting with one another was at the closing party for Fashion Week, when quote dozens of avatars grooved on a virtual dance floor as a video of a human DJ played on a big screen. End quote. Based on Peters's article and the Folding Ideas video, which again Peter's also references in the article, the current incarnation of the Metaverse, or at least decentral Lands version of the Metaverse, is pretty boring. Decentral Land, by the way, is one of the groups that has abandoned plans to incorporate VR into its version of the Metaverse, So instead of going with a virtual reality approach, which is sort of what Meta has been hinting at, they're looking at going with the third person avatar approach, similar to what you would see in a massively multiplayer online role playing game. So maybe it's unfair to say that the metaverse is kind of pointless and boring. Maybe you could argue we're still a year or two out from being able to see stuff that's really compelling beyond narrow use cases. That's entirely possible. But even if that is the case, there is a lot of work that has to be done to make the metaverse something interesting enough for me to want to check it out beyond say, you know, checking out a curiosity. Like if one of my favorite bands was going to do a virtual concert, I might check that out because I like the band and I might be enjoy being able to hear them play a set, even though I wouldn't actually be there in person. I might check that out. But I can't imagine going to the metaverse just to go and that. Until that changes, I think the metaverse is kind of at a non starter for me. Okay, we got a few more stories to cover before we get to that. Let's take one more break. We're back. Vietnam has joined the list of countries currently investigating TikTok So. In this case, Vietnam's government says that this investigation is to ensure that TikTok is complying with laws and regulations, and also that you know, it's paying its proper taxes. Plus there are some concerns about content, with government official Lee Kuangtudo saying quote the platform needs to aid by local regulations on both content and tax obligations end quote. And also that some content on TikTok was quote toxic, offensive, false, and superstitious end quote, which yeah, I mean that's true, But then there's also a lot of that kind of stuff on pretty much every single platform that allows for user generated content on it. But I do get it. TikTok is built in such a way that bad content can go viral awfully fast, and next thing you know, people are watching videos that convince them to try stupid, dangerous stuff, or they're watching videos that contain blatant lies that are being passed off as fact. And if you trust TikTok more than you know a credible source, you're bound to get into trouble. Previously, upon the request of Vietnam's government, TikTok removed one point seven million videos off the platform. This was just toward the end of last year. So we'll see if there's going to be a similar purge. In the wake of this new investigation, Toyota appears to be ready to dive into electric vehicle development with real fervor after years of resisting it. According to Reuters, the company has long leaned on alternatives to pure electric vehicles, including fuel cell vehicles and hybrids. The general perception in the car world that I have picked up on is that Toyota's really dragged its feet when it comes to electric vehicles and really tried to push hard for different approaches. But after a massive change in leadership, including a new CEO, the company now appears to be repositioning to focus seriously on electric vehicles. Whether or not Toyota can make up for a lost time remains to be seen. The company is definitely behind its competitors when it comes to creating the infrastructure needed to build electric vehicles apidly at scale, but better late than never. Sometimes international law enforcement activities get badass mission names. Such is the case with a recent operation that seized the Genesis market, an online market that catered to hackers and data thieves and other na'er duells. So what was the operation's name? Operation Cookie Monster? That's right, I referenced cookie Monster twice in this news episode. Apparently, the sting operation included two hundred eight property searches and one hundred nineteen arrests. Yowza Ours Technical reports that while the public facing web page was taken down, the dark web version is still up. If you were to use tour and to navigate to this marketplaces Onion based dark web website, you could actually still go there. So this suggests that the International Law Enforcement Group has not seized all of the assets held by this particular organization, so there's still work to be done. Apparently most of the activity on this hacker market involved the buying and selling of private information. There were around fifty nine thousand registered users on the site yikes, and that they were using tools that were doing things like creating a simulation of your browsers. So if your machine had been one of the ones compromised, someone could potentially be looking at what you're looking at in real time as you use the browser and be able to do things like logyear passwords and things of that nature, real fun stuff. So yeah, it's a good thing that it got seized, but obviously without the dark web assets being turned off, you know, that there's still more to be done. Finally, are you lonely and also are you flush with cash? And are you tired of dating poor people? Well, I have potentially good news for you. Tender is contemplating a service currently referenced as tender Vault, and this would let lonesome folks who have deep pockets find others who are like themselves. So, according to Yahoo Life, tender Vault would cost five hundred dollars a month, though you could pay up front for a year and save yourself some dough then it would just be five grand for the whole year, and in return, you would have your tender profile boosted. Plus you'd be able to look for other folks who had also joined tender Vault. So in other words, you could sort your searches so that you're only looking for other people who also spent five hundred bucks a month to be part of this group. So all the snooty rich people can make certain they could avoid all the innokds that stands for not all kind, dear, and then they could avoid the rest of us, you know, the unwashed peasants just trying to find love or a hook up. Personally, I wonder if those boosted profiles will be viewable by the general public, and if they will see that it's a profile belonging to a Tinder Vault user, because I could definitely see a rise in searches for a brand new sugar Daddy or sugar mommy year or whatever. Ain't love grand or maybe five grand a year. Okay, that's it for this episode of tech Stuff. Hope you are all well. If you'd like to reach out to me, you can do so by sending me a message on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech stuff HSW or you can drop me a line by using the little microphone icon on the tech Stuff page in the iHeartRadio app. It's free to downloads free to use. Just tap that little microphone you leave a voice message up to thirty seconds. I'm link and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.