The state of Texas goes after Meta/Facebook over data privacy. The US Senate might effectively end encrypted communication in the states. And a certain time machine might be opening its gull-wing doors to new customers soon.
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Welcome to tex 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 Tuesday, February twenty two. Let's get to it. The State of Texas has sued Meta, you know, the company formerly known as Facebook, for violating state privacy laws, specifically Texas UH. The Attorney General for Texas accuses Facebook of collecting facial recognition data without alerting or getting consent from users. The state also says Facebook shared this information with third party companies and failed to delete the information in a timely manner, as is required by Texas law. Now, this relates back to a feature that face Book, the platform, used to have, which is that you would upload a photo to Facebook and the site would suggest people you could tag in the photo by using facial recognition technology and looking for matches, mostly within your social network. The state says that the violation's number in the billions with a b, which is a pretty staggering thing to consider. What's more, according to Texas law, each violation could result in a fine of twenty dollars, so you know, you take grand and you multiply it by billions and you've got um. Hang on, let me see here, my calculator says a metric buttload of cash. Wild this last time, I'm buy a calculator out of a vending machine. Anyway, Meta reps say the case is without merit, though I should also add that the company has previously settled a class action lawsuit about a similar issue just last year, and the company actually did stop the facial workingition practice late last year, and that might take a little bit of the staying out of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's comment quote, Facebook will no longer take advantage of people and their children with the intent to turn a profit at the expense of one's safety and well being end quote, because apparently the company has already stopped this particular practice. However, I'll give some credit Baxton might be speaking more generally here, because of course Facebook and Meta do collect an awful lot of information, not just facial recognition information, but all sorts of information about people in lots of different ways, and share that with various third parties, so it goes well beyond a facial recognition problem. Tesla is facing another legal challenge, this time in South Korea. The country's antitrust regulator accuses Tesla of misrepresenting the range that the electric car company's vehicles can achieve on a single charge of the battery. For example, the Model three is advertised being able to travel up to three miles or kilometers on a single charge, but the antitrust regulator says that that is not true and that this means Tesla has violated a South Korean law called the Act on Fair Labeling and Advertising. Essentially, in America we would call it false advertising. Now, apparently at the heart of all this is the fact that batteries just don't work very well in cold weather, or at least less well as in weather with temperatures that dip below freezing. In those conditions, the cold actually inhibits the chemical reactions that happen inside a battery, and that's the Those are the chemical reactions that generate the electricity. So until the battery warms up, it can be you know, putting out less energy. And this is not a new thing. I mean, you might have heard the folk wisdom that if you have unused batteries like you know, you've opened up a new pack of batteries and you want to keep the other ones as long as possible, you should put them in the freezer. Uh. Not a good idea. I mean, it does inhibit the chemical reactions where the battery might be you know, just leaking energy over time. But it also means that when you take the batteries out of the freezer and you put them into something, they're not gonna be working very well. You might not even generate enough electricity to do whatever it is you need to do. So, like you put the batteries into a flashlight, You turn the switch and maybe you get a really dim light out of the bulb, but nothing, you know, useful. We've known this forever, right, So it appears to be that the issue here in South Korea is that Tesla vehicles that are in very cold temperatures are not able to achieve these distances on a single charge, and therefore Tesla was fibbing in its advertising. Now y'all know I can get a bit harsh on Tesla, but in this case, I think this lawsuit might be a bit much. I mean, it's pretty well understood that cold temperatures effect battery life. Folks using internal combustion engine vehicles have had issues where in very cold temperature, starting the car is a challenge because the car battery that's responsible for doing things like sending energy so you can get a sparkle of the spark plugs. If that's too cold, then nothing happens when you try and turn the engine over, and people have experienced that, so it's not like it's just unique to electric cars. So I guess Tesla could have put an asterisk or something by the claims to explain that in colder temperatures you should expect a different result. But all in all, I'm not entirely certain that this lawsuit is a fair one. A regulatory filing reveals that Berkshire Hathaway, a holding company owned by Warren Buffett, one of the wealthiest people on the planet, but fourteen point six six million shares an Activision Blizzard late last year, which means that it made the purchase a couple of weeks before news broke that Microsoft was set to acquire Activision Blizzard. That is pretty darn good news for Buffet, because that deal means Microsoft is gonna pay nine dollars per share of Activision blizzards shares to buy it out, and based on my quick math, buffets holding company bought shares when they were somewhere in the mid sixty dollar range, So it means you'd be making about thirty dollars per share. And remember they bought fourteen point six six million shares, that's a pretty hefty profit. Also, just an interesting side note, one of the former board members of Berkshire Hathaway was Microsoft co founder and former CEO and chairman Bill Gates. I mean, he stepped down from Berkshire Hathaway a couple of years ago, but he did serve on the board once upon a time. And um, you know, I'm not saying that there was any kind of insider trading going on there. I have no evidence of that, so I'm not saying that. I'm just saying it's fortuitous timing and some interesting coincidences. Intel announced it is acquiring a company called Tower Semiconductor for the princely sum of nearly six billion with a B dollars. Tower Semiconductor is an Israeli company that has semiconductor fabrication plants also known as fabs not fabulous but fabrication and they're locating places like the United States, Japan, Italy, and of course Israel. Intel is currently investing heavily in creating new fabrication facilities in an effort to not just alleviate the current semiconductor shortage because it's going to take a while for those facilities to come online, but also to distribute the fabrication load beyond where it currently kind of rests, which is mainly in Taiwan. Plus, the chip shortage really has proven how dependent we are on semiconductor chips, and that means manufacturing chips is pretty much a guaranteed way to make money, and it's just good for safety to spread that out a bit more so that if some thing goes wrong, the entire chain is not disrupted as a result. Now, we'll have to see if regulators in various countries allow this deal to go through. I honestly don't know how that's going to go, because we have seen a general trend where regulators are a bit more cautious about big companies and their acquisitions. However, in a lot of places like in the United States, we might see regulators who want to see this deal go through because the concerns of supply chains and chips are very much prevalent right now. I also wonder if Israel's regulators will be as enthusiastic, because a lot of countries view the semiconductor industry and companies within it as being key to national security. We saw that in England with arm where UK regulators were concerned about national security issues. Should an American company purchase a semi conductor company that was currently held by a Japanese conglomerate. It's a complicated thing anyway, interesting story. Over the last two years, we've seen a lot of reports about tech companies announcing and then subsequently pushing back dates relating to when corporate offices will reopen COVID, and pressure both from within the companies and outside of them has forced those dates to slip again and again. Well. Now, Microsoft says that starting February twenty, corporate offices in the San Francisco Bay area and in Washington State, which is the home headquarters state for Microsoft, will reopen once again, and not just to employees, but also to visitors and two guests. Now, that does not mean that all employees will be required to come into the office full time. Microsoft has a new work from home policy that allows for the possibility of more flexibility, but employees will have to work with their managers to find an arrangement that is acceptable to all parties, so it's not like a work from home guarantee. But Microsoft recognized is that people have grown used to that flexibility, and as we've seen across multiple industries, there's this tendency toward early retirement, you know, the great retirement is what people have been calling it, and that is a big concern for a lot of executives because it's awful hard to be an industry leader if you ain't got no one to lead anyway. Here's hoping that COVID actually really for real zes this time is easing off and that we're going to have a manageable baseline to work from, because the only major variants I want to see from here on out are Marvel characters. Um. But you know, it's impossible to predict the future. We're definitely going to be dealing with COVID from now on. The question then, is just can we make it a manageable experience so that things like working in an office in person with your co workers doesn't come with a massive risk attached. So here's hoping. Well, we're going to have a few more news stories, but first let's take a quick break. We're back. Last week, a court filing in an ongoing age discrimination lawsuit brought against IBM included some documents in which an executive referred to older employees as quote dino babies end quote. Now, the plaintiff in this case suing IBM says that these documents back up the plaintiffs assertions that IBM is trying to get rid of older employees in an effort to replace them with younger employees, presumably for way less money. And you know, there's all the different arguments about IBM executives apparently thinking that their aging workforce is out of touch, that they're not as capable in lots of very important uh tasks these days, like promotion on social networks, things like that. UM and I am of I'm of two minds on this. UM. So, on one hand, age discrimination is just gross and it should be dismantled. People should not be discriminated against because of their age. They shouldn't be discriminated against period, right, that should not be a thing. However, one of the longstanding perceptions of millennials is that they're lazy and they don't want to work, which is unfair, I think, because the truth of the matter is way more complicated, and it includes the fact that you have this aging workforce in various industries, and that aging workforce is not budging from their jobs, right, They're not leaving those positions open. So there aren't that many opportunities for younger workers that are in, you know, kind of the traditional stable career paths, Like millennials often take jobs, but it's a lot more challenging for them to get into a career right. And I don't think the answer is just to get rid of older employees because that doesn't seem fair either, Like, if if they need to work, then that also is an issue, um, and it's not fair to just get rid of them to hire younger employees, especially if that's part of the company strategy of let's save money because we don't have to pay the young people as much as we're paying the old people. That also seems kind of gross. And this whole lawsuit followed a time when IBM infamously laid off thousands of workers over the age of forty. However, IBM has issued statements saying that it does not engage in systemic age discrimination and that the messages and the documents don't reflect ibm s stance at all, and that they they claim at least that the average age of the IBM employee has not changed. Right when you average the ages across the entire company. It's not like the age is suddenly dept because they got rid of a lot of old people and hired a lot of new people. Are younger people, I should say, and um, yeah, I guess we'll have to wait and see how this lawsuit plays out over time to see, you know, one if the parties settled of court, or two if we get some sort of definitive proof one way or another. J Freeman a k a. Sark is in the news again. Very timely for me, because if you listen to my recent episodes, you might have heard me talk about Sark with regard to the practice of jail breaking, that is the practice of disabling Apple's protection on iOS devices so that you can load whatever software you would like onto them and not just be limited to whatever Apple allows in the app store. Well, now Freeman is in the news again because he found a way to essentially print ether, the cryptocurrency on the Ethereum blockchain. So Ethereum uses a scaling solution called optimism, and Freeman found an exploit in the optimism solution that would have allowed him to essentially create or meant his own bogus Ether. Now, Freeman didn't start printing counterfeit crypto bucks. Instead, he reported this flaw to optimist them, and in return received a two million dollar bug bounty for his troubles, which, honestly, when you think about it, that's chump change in the grand scheme of things. Because one of the basic foundational ideas with cryptocurrency and blockchain is that you shouldn't be able to mint your own coins, right. You should have to mind them or otherwise earn them in the system, but you shouldn't be able to just create them, nor should you be able to do stuff like spend the same coin more than once. You know the way you could do if there were no other protections in place, Because you're just talking about digital information that's easy for you to to create, right, so you have to have these systems in place to protect against that. So Freeman's discovery was one that could literally undermine confidence in an entire cryptocurrency system. If it were discovered that an exploit could allow you to print your own ether, well, that system could ultimately just collapse as a result, because you know you have, all confidence would be drop out of it since no one would know. Hey, the ether I got from that transaction? Is it real? Is it? Is it counterfeit? Is that ether going to go away? If it does go away? Am I going to be compensated because I accepted it in good faith? It's scary stuff. I mean, these are This is why we have like the Secret Service in the United States is in charge of investigating stuff like counterfeiting, because it very much gets to the heart of an economic system, and if if confidence drops in an economic system, the system itself falls apart. So pretty scary. A company called cha Analysis released a report saying that three quarters or nearly three quarters, of all ransomware attacks appear to originate from or are connected to Russia. Further, they also said that a significant amount of the money laundering that's taking place in the cryptocurrency world is filtered through Russian companies. The researchers pointed to certain key indicators that back up their claims. For example, they showed that a lot of ransomware code out there. We'll first check to see if the infected computer is located in Russia or not. And if it's in Russia or one of the few territories that were part of the former Soviet Union, then the ransomware isn't going to encrypt all the data on the machine and lock it down, so it does not target and infect uh those computers that specifically holds off on on locking them down. That suggests that the ransomware originated out of Russia or is operating with the consent of Russia, because, as they say, you do not poop where you eat. The researchers are very quick to say that they followed the money in ransomware attacks, and that really could just mean that the folks who are calling the shots are in Russia. But it's possible that the ground soldiers and then the hackers who are putting in the work could just be cyberguns for hire from you know, pretty much anywhere. Russia leaders have repeatedly denied any connection to hacker groups in ransomware, and not too long ago. Just last month, the Russian government said it had dismantled the well known ransomware group revel r E v I L. But I should add that that only came after numerous countries, including the United States, had launched massive campaigns to go after hackers believed to be part of the group, and some of them had been arrested. So you could argue that Russia's move here was one of self preservation by you know, dismantling the group before it gets any worse. The Senate Judiciary Committee in the United States recently passed a vote to bring the earn It Act to a full Senate vote, and that has a lot of privacy advocates worried. Also, it's a story that involves protecting children, so it's highly charged on an emotional level. And we often see these kind of things play out this way, where you'll have the surface, uh issue that you're targeting, which in this case is about protecting children, and I think everyone agrees, yes, that is something we should be concerned about. But then underneath it there are implications that go beyond protecting children and could mean disaster. So a lot of this is about removing certain protections that online platforms currently enjoy with regard to user generated content see if you're a platform that allows users to post stuff to that platform. Whether you are running a social networking platform or a blogging site, or maybe a video sharing site like YouTube or whatever, well, if you're running that platform, you are not held liable for the stuff that people share, because you didn't generate it. The users did. Now you're also supposed to take appropriate measures whenever material that is illegal or against your own policies pops up. You're supposed to actually take action in those cases when it's brought to your attention, but earn it would actually remove those protections that would make you liable, and it would force the companies that are running these online platforms to seek out and report instances of child sexual abuse material or see SAM. So this would mean platforms would have to go from being passive and only taking action when alerted to an infraction to becoming an active investigator on their own platforms. They would have to monitor, not just respond, but be more proactive and seek out instances where people are violating the rules. Now already, for certain platforms, the scale of that responsibility would be beyond their capabilities, like hundreds of hours of video or upload to YouTube every single minute, it is literally impossible to monitor all of that in real time and make sure that nothing illegal is slipping through. So you could argue that some platforms are just too big to be able to do this, at least to the letter of the law. If it should in fact pass into law. It hasn't yet, that's important. And beyond that, there's this concern about encryption and privacy. So Senator Richard Blumenthal has indicated that if a platform allows for end to end encrypted communication, that is, only the people who are communicating are able to see what is being sent back and forth. Well, such a service would not immediately be assumed to be liable for c SAM right because the service wouldn't know about it. However, Bluementhal says, the bill also says this encryption ability does not give a platform the chance to deflect responsibility either. So in other words, let's say, let's give it a hypothetical example based upon my understanding of this legislation. Let's say some investigators are doing a sting operation and they're communicating with someone through into into encryption on a platform, and they find out that that person is trafficking in see SAM through encrypted messaging. Well, the investigators could charge the platform with violating the earn It Act. And I hear some of you saying, wait a minute. If the actual communication channel really is encrypted end to end, then there would be no way for the platform, no matter who it is, to know if see SAM was part of that communication, because that's what end encryption means. It means that only those parties in the communication would see what was going on. That's the that's the promise of end end encryption is that your communications are protected their private not even the provider can see them. And that is the issue that critics are worried about, because it's just that platforms would have to abandon encrypted communication altogether or risk being liable for earn It violations that it could not possibly avoid. Otherwise there's no way to detect it, so there's no way to act on it, and yet they would be held liable if this Act were to become law as it appears to have been, you know, designed so far. Anyway, keep in mind this Act can still change dramatically and it may not ever go to law, but it does put platforms in an impossible position, at least with regard to allowing a cryptic communication so the critics are saying earn it would effectively mean the risk of providing encrypted communication services at least the United States would be too great and would lead to a surveillance culture of unprecedented proportions, or that we might even see platforms abandoned supporting user generated content altogether, although for some platforms like Facebook and YouTube that would pretty much mean they would just have to close up shop. So we'll have to see where this proposed legislation goes next and whether or not it uh it survives being altered and being voted upon. All Right, I've got several more little stories to cover before we get to that. Let's take another quick break. Okay, we're gonna close out with some futuristic stuff for this episode. First, we're going to go back to the future because the DeLorean Motor Company recently posted a promo before the Big Game that promises we're gonna get a new DeLorean and electric DeLorean with a focus on luxury. Apparently, the promo just really kind of shows a silhouette of gull wing doors of one of the the beautiful features of the original DeLorean. And you might remember the DeLorean as being the car that Doc Brown turned into a time machine in the Back to the Future series. Well, a lot of folks have a nostalgic soft spot for that car, specifically because of that movie, and um, that's funny because the car was not a high performance vehicle when it came out in nine. If you read reviews of the DeLorean that we're contemporary with the release of the Automobile, they are not but picularly positive reviews. By the time Back to the Future actually came out in the DeLorean had not been in production for three whole years, and a lot of folks, myself included, Uh, I didn't even know about the car until the movie came out, Like, I had never even heard of a DeLorean until I saw the movie. So anyway, the DeLorean Motor Company, which is not the original Delirian Motor Company, it's rather a reboot from the mid nineties and enthusiast ended up launching it in Texas and bought up all the existing parts that still remained out of the old Deloran Motor Company. Anyway, this new one is bringing the DeLorean back. Apparently no telling what the timetable actually is or how much an electric DeLorean is going to cost. You, I suspect it will be expensive, but I thought it was a cool thing to mention, Like as as all the practical parts of me say it would be silly to buy an electric DeLorean, but the child in me says once one. Something else that is cool is high performance computing, which is kind of a catch all descriptor for all sorts of very high powered computational processes. We used to call this stuff super computing back in the day, but we've sort of migrated away from calling it super computing because of the emergence of distributed systems and lots of other related stuff. Anyway, one of the big challenges of working with high performance computing is actually optimizing processes so that they can take full advantage of the system's capabilities. So generally there's this belief that you can either write a program that does stuff quickly but inaccurately, or it does stuff accurately but not quickly, and you can't do you can't be both fast and accurate at the same time because of how complicated it is to program for these very sophisticated systems. Well, now, researchers primarily based out of M I T have created a new programming language that they call a tensor language or a t l UH. The language gets super technical, and I don't really have time to dive into it and talk about what tin sores are are and all that kind of stuff. But essentially, the hope is that this programming language will make the process of optimizing programs designed for high performance computing platforms easier. The game gamers out there are all very well aware. There are a lot of games that come out that require a ton of computational power, and you could have the best system possible, like with the fastest hardware in the world, and still find it kind of chugging along. And some of that ends up being poor optimization. Like you could look at the program and say, well, there's nothing here that should be making my my system, you know, chug this way. The graphics are not that sophisticated, the lighting effects shouldn't be doing it, and yet it is. And that is because of optimization. So that is something that we see all the time with gaming, but we also see it in all different kinds of software. Well, when you're working with high performance computing systems, it becomes a real issue. It means that you're not really taking advantage of the resources that are available to you. So a t L will in theory, help programmers find the most efficient way to get the results they want from high performance computer operations, which could open up all sorts of doors. And I think that's pretty nifty. Okay, Let's say you're ready for virtual reality on the go like VR whay or out and about, or maybe augmented reality while you're out and about. However, you don't want to wear one of those super bulky headsets. You'd rather wear a sleek pair of glasses. But the problem is that form factor doesn't really allow for all the components you need to get a persistent Internet connection capable of providing you the experience you want. So what are you to do? Well, Motorola thinks you should get a high tech neck band that looks kind of like a lanyard and it could hold a lot of the key components in it. UM the product if it ever does become an actual product. Motorola says it will, but we don't know timing or pricing yet, and it also doesn't have a name yet. It does have some components that consists of a battery, a touch pad, some speakers, UM there's an accelerometer and a jar scope in there. It's got a simcard slot, is got a snap Dragon eight GIN one processor, and um it's compatible with Verizon's five gene network. It looks kind of like a smartphone sized puck on a strap to me. But the idea is that you could pair a lightweight set of VR or a R goggles with this thing, and the thing would provide the horsepower needed to run the glasses so that you could I don't know, meta the verse or whatever it is you want to do. It's not necessarily a bad idea because it would take some of the weight that you would otherwise is have to wear on your face, and it puts it around your neck and on your chest, and so I think that's pretty cool in that sense. And the company, Motorola, it's saying that that's going to target this product toward quote, sports training and fan experiences, as well as making VR theaters scalable end quote, and also looking at enterprise users. So not necessarily something that you would pick up for a consumer product. Now I'll believe it when I see it, simply because I know there's still a lot of folks who are not sold on this whole the idea of having to wear something on their face to experience technology. Uh. Like, I also think of the people who are paying huge amounts of money to go to a sporting event, let's say the Big Game, UM, where I think the average ticket price was somewhere around seven thousand, eight thousand dollars per seat. Like, I can't imagine paying that much money and saying, oh, I should put on these glasses so that I can see something other than what I paid a whole lot of money to be at. I don't know, Maybe I'm just I could just be missing the whole point here. And Hey, if you want to go to space and you have four fifty thousand bucks burning a hole in your very very very large pockets, have I got a deal for you? Because Virgin Galactic is planning to market its flights to quote unquote space this year. Now, as a reminder, this version of going to space involves writing aboard an aircraft that is in turn piggybacking on a larger aircraft, and at the appropriate altitude your aircraft separates from the mothership. The aircraft ignitsance, engines, and then soars to around KOs in altitude now that's high enough to get a really nice view of the Earth and see the blackness of space, and even experience some micro gravity, not true weightlessness, but like you know, only three percent of the earth gravity, so close enough for you to kind of call it weightless, but it's still well below the Carmen line, which one kilometers in altitude. That's where most space agencies define the beginning of space. Uh. In America, we award people astronaut wings if they go above fifty kilometers in altitude. But then again, you know, we all know that where space begins as something of a debate among various agencies because there are a lot of different ways to look at that. Anyway, you won't be going up in orbit because it does not reach that speed or that altitude, and the whole flight from takeoff to touchdown lasts around ninety minutes, and the space bit lasts quote several minutes end quote Gali. Anyway, the company says it plans to quote have our first one thousand customers on board at the start of commercial service later this year, providing an incredibly strong foundation as we begin regular operations and scale our fleet end quote. And here I was wondering if there ever would be a service that can make me feel as inferior as the old Concorde supersonic jet service did. And here we go. Anyway, rich people are gonna go really really high up in the sky and they're gonna see Earth from way up there, which is supposed to be a transformational experience. But I will believe more when they start spending some of the ridiculous wealth they have on solving real world problems for everyone else. And I'm grouchy, so I'm gonna end this episode. But lastly, today marks my fifteen work anniversary. Fifteen years ago today I started working as a staff writer for how Stuff Works dot com. It wouldn't be until mid two thousand eight that we would launch this podcast. And of course, while I've essentially been in the same career path since two thousand and seven, the name of my corporate overlord has changed a few times, from Convex Group to Discovery Communications to Blue Cora too. Well, in anyway, it's changed a lot. But through that whole thing, I've been here reading up on tech, sharing what I've earned with others, and here's to looking at the next fifteen years. By then, we should have the metaverse, so you'll probably experience this podcast through your hollow pot or something. Oh no, maybe we'll see anyway. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover on tech Stuff, reach out to me on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon, y. Text 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