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, July sixth, twenty twenty three. And a whole lot is happening in the social network platform space right now, as I'm sure many of you are aware. So last weekend, Twitter changed quite a bit and it really upset a lot of people. First up, folks noticed that unless you were actually logged into Twitter, you couldn't see stuff that had been posted on Twitter. Now, that was not always the case. You could go and view things on Twitter without logging in. My wife has done this numerous times. She does not have a Twitter account but occasionally checks Twitter. Now this has since been walked back, so now if you don't have an account, you can view it again. But for a while you couldn't. Beyond that, Even if you were logged in to an account, you would notice that you would hit some view limits on the number of tweets you could see. Initially, those limits were the ability to see up to three hundred tweets per day, if you were brand spank and new and an unverified account, or rather not a Twitter Blue subscriber, I guess we should say verification at this point means very little existing quote unquote unverified accounts. So those who are not Twitter Blue subscribers but who have been on Twitter for a while, they could see up to six hundred tweets per day. And then if you were a verified user, a Twitter Blue subscriber, or maybe one of the celebrities that Musk granted verification to, possibly as a trolling tactic, I don't know, anyway, they could see up to six thousand tweets per day. Elon Musk ventually explained his reasons for doing this. He said that Twitter was being bombarded by bots, and those bots were scraping data from Twitter in efforts to build out things like large language models for AI chat bots, and that the platform had made the changes in an effort to confound those bots, and they couldn't tell anyone about it beforehand because then the companies behind the bots would have, you know, changed their tactics or something, which is weird to me because by not communicating it, all you're doing is just delaying the amount of time it takes them to adjust to the tactics, Like, if that's your concern that by announcing that you're going to do this, you're giving people the chance to circumvent it, well, if they can circumvent it, then why aren't that Shouldn't that be happening right now? Right that circumvention should be going on right now. So it doesn't matter whether you say it or not, I don't know whatever. So it's an unfortunate side effect that, you know, this attempt to confound the bots affected everybody. Musk mention that the limits were temporary, and I believe at the time that I'm recording this right now, those limits have been increased to five hundred tweets for brand new users, one thousand for unverified but existing accounts, and ten thousand tweets for verified users. A couple of other things we need to mention here. One is that if this were a plan to confound bots, it seems dumb because a verified account is not that expensive, not for a company that's looking to build out large language models. They could end up making lots of accounts and then paying the small fee to verify them or to subscribe to Twitter Blue and then use those to scrape data. I mean, I guess Twitter could ban those accounts, but still it's not a big expense. Secondly, Twitter relies on revenue from advertising. Now I am no business genius, but it seems to me that this move is discouraging advertisers from continuing to work with Twitter because if they are being told, hey, fewer people are going to be able to see your tweet because of these limits, they're going to say, what are we paying for? Then we're paying for people to see our ads. And if you're limiting the number of tweets they can see, then that means you're limiting the number of people who can see our ads. Third, as we will talk about in a moment, Meta launched its own Twitter competitor this week, So the timing of this move seems almost comical, right. It seems like Elon Musk is trying to convince people to jump ship and move over to Meta's short messaging social platform threads and just leave Twitter, y'all. Maybe Elon Musk really is a space brain business genius, like some people say, but from my humble perspective, it sure looks like he's made some dumb moves in a very short amount of time. In addition to those decisions, Twitter also made another move that has upset a lot of users, including me, and that's a change to the social media dashboard app called tweet Deck. Now, for those of y'all who have never used tweet deck, this tool has some really useful features, and big among those is that you can use tweet deck to set up a view so you can monitor multiple Twitter accounts from the same screen. So in one view, I would be able to see my Twitter feed and then all of the replies and mentions for me, I'd be able to see the feeds for the Twitter handle for this show, which is technically tech stuff HSW. But now that tweet deck is locked behind a paywall, I'm not sure how often I'll be logging in to check on it. Plus, I could have a view for my old show Forward Thinking, or my other podcast large nerdron Collider, etc. Tweet Deck made it really easy to see activity across multiple accounts. Media managers loved tools like this because they could have one view and maintain a good idea of what's going on across any accounts they happen to manage. So if you are a manager, who Maybe you have multiple clients and you like to have a single view so you can see what's going on at any given time. This becomes frustrating. Tweet Deck started off as an independent third party app, but in twenty eleven, Twitter purchased it, and the key element in all of this is that tweet Deck, until now, or really until later this year, was free to use, and then this month, Twitter announced that tweet deck is shifting to become a Twitter Blue exclusive feature. So when you take that in with the other weird moves that happened over this past weekend, it sure does feel like Musk's attempt to convince more people to subscribe is what is driving these moves. Maybe it has to do with bots in the case of limiting p people's ability to see posts, but it sounds more like, hey, if you want to see a lot of posts, you need to subscribe, and locking tweet Deck behind a Twitter Blue subscription seems likewise an attempt to get people to subscribe to Twitter Blue, and considering the shaky ground the company is on with advertisers, I can see why maybe Musk is hoping that subscriptions will pick up the slack that's left by advertisers getting really concerned about spending their money on Twitter. But it is really hard to convince people to fork over a subscription fee for Twitter blues features when you've also got drum roll. Please Meta Threads. So Meta launched Threads yesterday. This is the company's answer to stuff like Twitter and masted On and blue Sky, which is currently in an invitation only beta program. I only just got access to blue Sky today because I dragged my feet on requesting an invite, and I don't know that I would have gotten one if I even had requested an invite early on. It's kind of a moot point. I ended up getting a invitation code from a friend of mine, so I'm on blue Sky. It's neat. Not revolutionary, but neat. Anyway. Meta has positioned Threads to be an extension of Instagram. That makes a lot of sense because Instagram boasts more than two point three billion active users. That's billion with a B. So what better way to compete with Twitter than to leverage an already existing enormous user base. Now, according to Engadget, it took Threads about seven hours to reach ten million users because you do still have to create an account and you do still have to download the app and stuff, but it is connected to your Instagram account. This is what gives Threads a huge leg up on would be competitors like Blue Sky. Blue Sky has to start from scratch. Threads is already an extension of an enormously successful company. So why would Meta bother with a Twitter competitor at all. Well, the answer to that question is pretty much because Elon Musk has created a huge opportunity. Musk's handling of Twitter has alienated a good number of users. Now there's some users who absolutely love what Twitter has become, and there are a lot of others who they have bemoaned the changes that have happened since Musk has taken over the company. And as I mentioned earlier, quite a few advertisers are disenchanted with Twitter. So if Meta can establish a competitive service, the company stands to gain by convincing those advertisers to just go all in on a meta focused advertising approach. I would not be surprised if salespeople in Meta are positioning ad deals that include, you know, an ad campaign as a presence on Facebook and Instagram and eventually on Threads. So, in other words, Musk made some brash moves, and now Zuckerberg wants to drink his milkshake and there will be blood terminology. I actually reactivated my old Instagram account last night just to create a Thread's presence and to see what it's like. This hurt me emotionally to reconnect my Instagram account because I just hadn't been on there in more than a year. Anyway, right now, Threads is a little bit of a chaotic mess Users face kind of a fire hose of messages from folks that they may or may not follow on Instagram. And this is kind of Thread's attempt to populate the feed with more than just two or three messages. Because if you logged in there and the only thing you saw were the people you're connected to on Instagram and what they had to say, you might not see anything at all. Right, maybe none of your friends are on there, or none of the accounts you follow are on there. This way, it creates a reliable, you know, flo of information and hopefully, according to Meta anyway, hopefully convince people to stick with the service. Now it's early days, I expect we're going to see Meta roll out more features than the not too distant future. Right now, there are some minor oversights, like there's no easy way to just look at the stuff that your friends are posting, so you do get this fire hose approach. Also, you can't do any direct messaging through Threads. You can in Instagram, but not through Threads, and maybe that's going to change. We'll have to see. Now. Personally, I'm a little reluctant to jump in wholeheartedly and to make Threads my new means of communicating to the public, because, as Twitter's former CEO Jack Dorsey pointed out on Twitter No Less Meta notoriously slurts up all the personal data it can, including how long you're using its services, what other services you use, what purchases you make online, and way way more than just that. So feeding that machine isn't something I am personally excited about doing. But there is no denying that Threads has already been a huge success. Word of warning. By the way, if you make a Threads profile, you can delete it, but only if you also delete your Instagram account. So once it's up, it's up, unless you're ready to nuke it from orbit, because that's the only way to be sure. Okay, we're going to take a quick break to think. Our sponsors will be back with more news in just a moment. We're back. In France, citizens, primarily young people, have been holding protests, some of those escalating into full blown riots. This happened after French police killed a teenager who was stopped during a traffic stop in a Parisian suburb last week. That's a terrible story in of itself. But the tech angle here is that the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, has threatened to suspend social networking platforms in France in response, or at least raised the possibility of doing so, maybe not going so far as threatening, but at least raising the question of maybe that should be an option. So the concern is that the rioters or protesters if you want to be more critical of the government, are relying on social networks to schedule and organize themselves, so by cutting off that avenue, Macron could potentially attempt to restore order in times of political unrest. This announcement, however, has spurred massive criticisms against Macron, saying that it's the sort of move that an authoritarian leader would make against citizens in an effort to suppress the freedom of speech, I mentioned the freedom of assembly, and Macrone's office has responded by saying that the idea was never a widespread general blackout that would go on indefinitely. Instead, this was really meant to initiate a conversation between leaders of various territories and cities within France and talk about the role of social networks during times of political unrest and what moves, if any, would be reasonable during such turbulent times. Now, we've seen lots of other countries lean into silencing online communication in the name of security, and it can often lead to governments going for that pause button more and more frequently, with less and less justification. So critics argue that all of this, all this discussion about the role that social networks are playing in the part of planning out these protests or assembling for riots, is really just a distraction from the actual underlying problem, which is police violence against city and until that is addressed, the rest of this is kind of moot, because the problem isn't just that people are getting together and rioting. The problem is that they're doing this in response to a perceived violation of justice. So that has been the large criticism that has been posed against the government as well, that they're really not actually dedicating the attention they need to the underlying issue. Getting back to Meta for a moment, there's a war going on between Canadian leadership and Zuckerberg's company, and this is in regards to a law the Canadian government passed that requires platforms like Meta to pay Canadian media for the news that folks post on platforms like Facebook. We've seen a similar law like this enacted in Australia, and the argument is that platforms like Meta end up hurting publishers and they profit off of publishers work without sharing of the revenue with the people who created the work in the first place. Meta, in response, has restricted news content from appearing on its platforms if you're viewing them in Canada, and now the Canadian government is saying it will pull all government advertising from Meta's platforms. Now, that is not actually that huge of an escalation because my assumption is that the Canadian government is not a major advertiser on Meta, especially when you're looking at global revenue, when you're looking at more than one hundred billion dollars worldwide. But this does send the message that Canada is not backing down from the legislation. Also, the government hopes that other companies in Canada will follow suit and pull their advertising off of Meta's platforms, and that other countries that are in the process of passing similar laws to protect local media will continue to do so. And if that happens, it's possible leverage will change and Meta will have to make some concessions or risk losing out on significant revenue. So you know, the argument is share a little bit now or lose out a lot later on. Though you could argue that Meta is concerned about other countries all doing this and then collectively they take a huge bite out of Meta's revenue, So we'll have to see. TikTok's lawyers have petitioned a US judge to block a Montana ban on TikTok before the ban takes effect in January first of next year. TikTok argues that this ban constitutes a violation of First Amendment rights, both for TikTok users and for the company itself. This is where I remind myself and everybody else here in the United States, corporations are legally people because for lots of reasons, actually, many of which really do make a lot of sense, but that's a discussion for another time. The Montana ban calls for fines of up to ten grand per violation if TikTok allows content to appear in the state of Montana. In other words, if if citizens are allowed to access TikTok within Montana, TikTok could be hit by ten grand the worth of fines each time. According to TikTok, more than a third of Montana's citizens are actually on TikTok, so you know, that's a lot of the state's population to cut off from the service, though in the grand scheme of things, we're talking about just three hundred and eighty thousand people here, because Montana is not a heavily populated state. How this law would actually be enforced as a pretty darn good question, and how TikTok is supposed to handle it is another one. And how the state can prevent citizens from accessing TikTok through VPNs as yet another good question. This all stems from the ongoing concern that TikTok serves as a data siphon that takes precious US citizen information and funnels it to China. That's an accusation that the company has repeatedly denied. But then there have been lots of people who have contradicted those denials, including people who formerly worked for TikTok or its parent company. So at this point I don't know who or what to believe. But as I have said many times before, in an era where our private information is collected by numerous companies and then bought and sold on the open market, taking out TikTok is kind of like if you were to plug up a small hole in a dam, and to your left and to your right are dozens of other holes that you haven't even touched. Sure, you've plugged one, but the problem is that this has been going on for a while, and it's not due to a single source. So yeah, I think the problem here is much bigger, and the issue is we've been distracted by focusing just on TikTok. France has passed a surveillance bill that has civil liberties activists highly concerned. Going back to France again, this bill allows authorities to essentially tap into citizens' devices like laptops, smartphones, their cars, any other connected gadgets they might rely upon, and to use those devices to track them and to essentially spy on them. That could even include activating a device's camera and microphone to record images and sounds of targets. This law does have some limits. It's not that the authorities can just, you know, turn it on and spy on everybody all the time. First, they have to secure permission from a judge before they can begin surveilling a subject. And they are only supposed to be able to use this tactic when quote justified by the nature and seriousness of the crime end quote. I don't know what the threshold is for a crime to be serious enough to be to warrant this kind of thing. I guess that's up to the individual judge's judgment. But yeah, that's somewhat troubling that there's not a more, you know, concrete threshold. Further, if you are a journalist, a judge, a lawyer, or a doctor, I have some good news for you. You've got some protection because those jobs do not fall under legitimate targets according to the law. This was an effort to prevent the law from being abused, so that officials could say, keep an eye out on a pesky journalist who is working on a big expose about local government or something. The law is supposed to protect people from that. If they fall into those categories, anyone outside of that, it's a different story. The law also has a time limit on how long authorities are allowed to spy on a target, which is a maximum of six months. Half the year. Seems like quite a time, and I suppose at the end of that the authorities could petition another judge to get another allowance to continue spying on people. Activists point out this is already a potentially catastrophic violation of citizen privacy and security, and furthermore, it could be the start of a slippery slope into more pervasive surveillance. As to how the government will actually achieve these results, I presume it will require the cooperation of device and telecommunications companies, because otherwise there's not like a magic button that you can push that lets you, you know, select a random citizen and then tap into all their technology. You would need some methodology to access that that stuff, which could mean either that you have to get access to the actual gadget and then install like an espionage app on there that would let you do that, something akin to what the NSO Group has done out of Israel selling it it's Pegasus package to iOS device, you know, infiltrators that kind of thing, or maybe direct work with the various telecommunications companies and gadget companies to have them cooperate with this, which I would imagine would be a tall ask, like it'd be a big, big request to get those companies to agree, because consumers don't like that kind of stuff, and if a consumer finds out that a company is in cahoots with the government to spy on people, that could be a real pr blow to a company's image. So we'll have to see how this develops, because I'm very curious how it actually gets enforced, how it actually moves forward. But even without those questions, it's a huge concern to me. I think that this is a bad step for law and for technology and for the continuation of the surveillance state. Okay, we're going to take another quick break. When we come back, I've got a few more stories to cover. Okay, we're back and ready to wrap up this news episode. I've got three more stories. First up. In New York City, City government officials have passed a law that will require hiring organizations to pay for an auditor, a third party auditor to come in and check any software that uses automated processes for the purposes of hiring. So if you are a company that either outsources you're hiring to another company, or you're using software that has automated systems to kind of sort candidates so that you can more effectively decide upon who you should hire, this applies to those companies. So the goal here is to identify any unwanted bias in the automated system that could disproportionately be disadvantageous to certain populations. Right, we have seen multiple instances of bias incorporated into automated functions. Now, most of the time this is unintentional. It's not that bias is built in on purpose, but bias can be a part of automated systems and it can still have a massive negative impact on affected individuals. So as companies lean harder on AI and automation to do things like sort through potential job candidates, it becomes really important to identify possible problems in the software so that legit job seekers aren't left out of the loop through no fault of their own and they are just discriminated against due to this, you know, systemic bias that's built into the software. So companies that do not comply with the bias audit law will face fines for violations. But these fines are are I mean, they're pretty small. They're like three hundred and seventy five bucks for the first offense, which is you know, that's nothing for most businesses. Three hundred and fifty dollars for a fence number two, and then every time after that it's fifteen hundred bucks. And by a violation, we're not talking about every instance of the use of such software. Rather, we're talking about each day a company uses an automated tool that has not yet been audited, or has been audited and found to have bias and it hasn't been addressed, or that the company has failed to inform job applicants that part of the process involves software with automated processes in it. Anything like that would count as a violation for each day, So a day ends up being a violation as opposed to an instance. So interesting that New York City has passed this, I hope to see similar laws passed in other areas. I think it is important to make certain that as we start to lean heavier on AI that we build in protections that can help prevent unintended consequences from affecting people, because we've seen it happen time and again already in other applications like facial recognition technology, for example, So we want to make sure that those are not really present for these kind of things. I mean, you don't want to be out of work and then submitting your resume and you know, cover letter and all that kind of stuff to a company and then find out that you weren't even up for consideration because some automated program had a bias in it that automatically dismissed you from consideration. That would stink. You know, you might be the perfect person for that job, it might be your passion and you never get a chance because some automated piece of software had bias built into it. So we definitely need laws like this because I don't think there's enough of a move within the companies that are making this software to stop it at the source from the very get go. In fact, a lot of times they're just not even aware of it. That's why you have to have the third party auditor come in and really check it. Out now second our penultimate story, second to last. Stephen Winkleman, the CEO or Steffan I guess I should say Stefan Winkleman, the CEO of the famous car company Lamborghini, has said that Lamborghini has now sold its last fully gas powered supercar. So it is the end of an era. From this point forward, all vehicles sold by Lamborghini will at the very least be hybrid cars, with all electric vehicles coming a few years down the road, so to speak. Now, this does not mean Lamborghini has manufactured its last gas only vehicle, and that's because Lamborghini is a company that takes pre orders on cars and then builds them to order. So this is like a luxury supercar experience. So while Lamborghini has sold its final gas drink and supercar, the car hasn't been built yet. That's still in the future. It's still an interesting footnote in history that July twenty twenty three was the month when Lamborghini sold its last gas only vehicle. It's a real mark of change. And finally, after more than two months, NASA has re established communications with the Mars based helicopter Ingenuity. This plucky little vehicle relies upon the Mars rover Perseverance to provide the communication link to NASA, But at the conclusion of its last flight, which happened more than two months ago, Ingenuity plopped down on Martian soil and a rocky hill blocked its line of sight to Perseverance, and as such there was no way for NASA to connect to the little helicopter because he needed that line of sight connection. Now Perseverance has moved into a position that allows for communication, so NASA can finally gather data from Ingenuity's fifty second flight and then check diagnostics to see if the helicopter is up for another jaunt in a couple of weeks. Ingenuity has been on Mars since early twenty twenty one. It made its first flight on April nineteenth of twenty twenty one, and originally the hope was to get five flights out of a little thing. So this sucker has punched way above its weight, having gone on more than fifty flights at this point. Ingenuity has gathered images that have helped NASA plot out the route for Perseverance, so that has been like Ingenuity's prime operational use is to kind of gather intelligence so that engineers can figure out the best way forward for Perseverance to be able to explore Mars's surface while encountering as few obstacles as possible. So here's hoping ingenuity can keep taking to the skies for a while longer yet. And that is it. That's the tech news for Thursday, July sixth, twenty twenty three. I hope you are all well and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech 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, July sixth, twenty twenty three. And a whole lot is happening in the social network platform space right now, as I'm sure many of you are aware. So last weekend, Twitter changed quite a bit and it really upset a lot of people. First up, folks noticed that unless you were actually logged into Twitter, you couldn't see stuff that had been posted on Twitter. Now, that was not always the case. You could go and view things on Twitter without logging in. My wife has done this numerous times. She does not have a Twitter account but occasionally checks Twitter. Now this has since been walked back, so now if you don't have an account, you can view it again. But for a while you couldn't. Beyond that, Even if you were logged in to an account, you would notice that you would hit some view limits on the number of tweets you could see. Initially, those limits were the ability to see up to three hundred tweets per day, if you were brand spank and new and an unverified account, or rather not a Twitter Blue subscriber, I guess we should say verification at this point means very little existing quote unquote unverified accounts. So those who are not Twitter Blue subscribers but who have been on Twitter for a while, they could see up to six hundred tweets per day. And then if you were a verified user, a Twitter Blue subscriber, or maybe one of the celebrities that Musk granted verification to, possibly as a trolling tactic, I don't know, anyway, they could see up to six thousand tweets per day. Elon Musk ventually explained his reasons for doing this. He said that Twitter was being bombarded by bots, and those bots were scraping data from Twitter in efforts to build out things like large language models for AI chat bots, and that the platform had made the changes in an effort to confound those bots, and they couldn't tell anyone about it beforehand because then the companies behind the bots would have, you know, changed their tactics or something, which is weird to me because by not communicating it, all you're doing is just delaying the amount of time it takes them to adjust to the tactics, Like, if that's your concern that by announcing that you're going to do this, you're giving people the chance to circumvent it, well, if they can circumvent it, then why aren't that Shouldn't that be happening right now? Right that circumvention should be going on right now. So it doesn't matter whether you say it or not, I don't know whatever. So it's an unfortunate side effect that, you know, this attempt to confound the bots affected everybody. Musk mention that the limits were temporary, and I believe at the time that I'm recording this right now, those limits have been increased to five hundred tweets for brand new users, one thousand for unverified but existing accounts, and ten thousand tweets for verified users. A couple of other things we need to mention here. One is that if this were a plan to confound bots, it seems dumb because a verified account is not that expensive, not for a company that's looking to build out large language models. They could end up making lots of accounts and then paying the small fee to verify them or to subscribe to Twitter Blue and then use those to scrape data. I mean, I guess Twitter could ban those accounts, but still it's not a big expense. Secondly, Twitter relies on revenue from advertising. Now I am no business genius, but it seems to me that this move is discouraging advertisers from continuing to work with Twitter because if they are being told, hey, fewer people are going to be able to see your tweet because of these limits, they're going to say, what are we paying for? Then we're paying for people to see our ads. And if you're limiting the number of tweets they can see, then that means you're limiting the number of people who can see our ads. Third, as we will talk about in a moment, Meta launched its own Twitter competitor this week, So the timing of this move seems almost comical, right. It seems like Elon Musk is trying to convince people to jump ship and move over to Meta's short messaging social platform threads and just leave Twitter, y'all. Maybe Elon Musk really is a space brain business genius, like some people say, but from my humble perspective, it sure looks like he's made some dumb moves in a very short amount of time. In addition to those decisions, Twitter also made another move that has upset a lot of users, including me, and that's a change to the social media dashboard app called tweet Deck. Now, for those of y'all who have never used tweet deck, this tool has some really useful features, and big among those is that you can use tweet deck to set up a view so you can monitor multiple Twitter accounts from the same screen. So in one view, I would be able to see my Twitter feed and then all of the replies and mentions for me, I'd be able to see the feeds for the Twitter handle for this show, which is technically tech stuff HSW. But now that tweet deck is locked behind a paywall, I'm not sure how often I'll be logging in to check on it. Plus, I could have a view for my old show Forward Thinking, or my other podcast large nerdron Collider, etc. Tweet Deck made it really easy to see activity across multiple accounts. Media managers loved tools like this because they could have one view and maintain a good idea of what's going on across any accounts they happen to manage. So if you are a manager, who Maybe you have multiple clients and you like to have a single view so you can see what's going on at any given time. This becomes frustrating. Tweet Deck started off as an independent third party app, but in twenty eleven, Twitter purchased it, and the key element in all of this is that tweet Deck, until now, or really until later this year, was free to use, and then this month, Twitter announced that tweet deck is shifting to become a Twitter Blue exclusive feature. So when you take that in with the other weird moves that happened over this past weekend, it sure does feel like Musk's attempt to convince more people to subscribe is what is driving these moves. Maybe it has to do with bots in the case of limiting p people's ability to see posts, but it sounds more like, hey, if you want to see a lot of posts, you need to subscribe, and locking tweet Deck behind a Twitter Blue subscription seems likewise an attempt to get people to subscribe to Twitter Blue, and considering the shaky ground the company is on with advertisers, I can see why maybe Musk is hoping that subscriptions will pick up the slack that's left by advertisers getting really concerned about spending their money on Twitter. But it is really hard to convince people to fork over a subscription fee for Twitter blues features when you've also got drum roll. Please Meta Threads. So Meta launched Threads yesterday. This is the company's answer to stuff like Twitter and masted On and blue Sky, which is currently in an invitation only beta program. I only just got access to blue Sky today because I dragged my feet on requesting an invite, and I don't know that I would have gotten one if I even had requested an invite early on. It's kind of a moot point. I ended up getting a invitation code from a friend of mine, so I'm on blue Sky. It's neat. Not revolutionary, but neat. Anyway. Meta has positioned Threads to be an extension of Instagram. That makes a lot of sense because Instagram boasts more than two point three billion active users. That's billion with a B. So what better way to compete with Twitter than to leverage an already existing enormous user base. Now, according to Engadget, it took Threads about seven hours to reach ten million users because you do still have to create an account and you do still have to download the app and stuff, but it is connected to your Instagram account. This is what gives Threads a huge leg up on would be competitors like Blue Sky. Blue Sky has to start from scratch. Threads is already an extension of an enormously successful company. So why would Meta bother with a Twitter competitor at all. Well, the answer to that question is pretty much because Elon Musk has created a huge opportunity. Musk's handling of Twitter has alienated a good number of users. Now there's some users who absolutely love what Twitter has become, and there are a lot of others who they have bemoaned the changes that have happened since Musk has taken over the company. And as I mentioned earlier, quite a few advertisers are disenchanted with Twitter. So if Meta can establish a competitive service, the company stands to gain by convincing those advertisers to just go all in on a meta focused advertising approach. I would not be surprised if salespeople in Meta are positioning ad deals that include, you know, an ad campaign as a presence on Facebook and Instagram and eventually on Threads. So, in other words, Musk made some brash moves, and now Zuckerberg wants to drink his milkshake and there will be blood terminology. I actually reactivated my old Instagram account last night just to create a Thread's presence and to see what it's like. This hurt me emotionally to reconnect my Instagram account because I just hadn't been on there in more than a year. Anyway, right now, Threads is a little bit of a chaotic mess Users face kind of a fire hose of messages from folks that they may or may not follow on Instagram. And this is kind of Thread's attempt to populate the feed with more than just two or three messages. Because if you logged in there and the only thing you saw were the people you're connected to on Instagram and what they had to say, you might not see anything at all. Right, maybe none of your friends are on there, or none of the accounts you follow are on there. This way, it creates a reliable, you know, flo of information and hopefully, according to Meta anyway, hopefully convince people to stick with the service. Now it's early days, I expect we're going to see Meta roll out more features than the not too distant future. Right now, there are some minor oversights, like there's no easy way to just look at the stuff that your friends are posting, so you do get this fire hose approach. Also, you can't do any direct messaging through Threads. You can in Instagram, but not through Threads, and maybe that's going to change. We'll have to see. Now. Personally, I'm a little reluctant to jump in wholeheartedly and to make Threads my new means of communicating to the public, because, as Twitter's former CEO Jack Dorsey pointed out on Twitter No Less Meta notoriously slurts up all the personal data it can, including how long you're using its services, what other services you use, what purchases you make online, and way way more than just that. So feeding that machine isn't something I am personally excited about doing. But there is no denying that Threads has already been a huge success. Word of warning. By the way, if you make a Threads profile, you can delete it, but only if you also delete your Instagram account. So once it's up, it's up, unless you're ready to nuke it from orbit, because that's the only way to be sure. Okay, we're going to take a quick break to think. Our sponsors will be back with more news in just a moment. We're back. In France, citizens, primarily young people, have been holding protests, some of those escalating into full blown riots. This happened after French police killed a teenager who was stopped during a traffic stop in a Parisian suburb last week. That's a terrible story in of itself. But the tech angle here is that the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, has threatened to suspend social networking platforms in France in response, or at least raised the possibility of doing so, maybe not going so far as threatening, but at least raising the question of maybe that should be an option. So the concern is that the rioters or protesters if you want to be more critical of the government, are relying on social networks to schedule and organize themselves, so by cutting off that avenue, Macron could potentially attempt to restore order in times of political unrest. This announcement, however, has spurred massive criticisms against Macron, saying that it's the sort of move that an authoritarian leader would make against citizens in an effort to suppress the freedom of speech, I mentioned the freedom of assembly, and Macrone's office has responded by saying that the idea was never a widespread general blackout that would go on indefinitely. Instead, this was really meant to initiate a conversation between leaders of various territories and cities within France and talk about the role of social networks during times of political unrest and what moves, if any, would be reasonable during such turbulent times. Now, we've seen lots of other countries lean into silencing online communication in the name of security, and it can often lead to governments going for that pause button more and more frequently, with less and less justification. So critics argue that all of this, all this discussion about the role that social networks are playing in the part of planning out these protests or assembling for riots, is really just a distraction from the actual underlying problem, which is police violence against city and until that is addressed, the rest of this is kind of moot, because the problem isn't just that people are getting together and rioting. The problem is that they're doing this in response to a perceived violation of justice. So that has been the large criticism that has been posed against the government as well, that they're really not actually dedicating the attention they need to the underlying issue. Getting back to Meta for a moment, there's a war going on between Canadian leadership and Zuckerberg's company, and this is in regards to a law the Canadian government passed that requires platforms like Meta to pay Canadian media for the news that folks post on platforms like Facebook. We've seen a similar law like this enacted in Australia, and the argument is that platforms like Meta end up hurting publishers and they profit off of publishers work without sharing of the revenue with the people who created the work in the first place. Meta, in response, has restricted news content from appearing on its platforms if you're viewing them in Canada, and now the Canadian government is saying it will pull all government advertising from Meta's platforms. Now, that is not actually that huge of an escalation because my assumption is that the Canadian government is not a major advertiser on Meta, especially when you're looking at global revenue, when you're looking at more than one hundred billion dollars worldwide. But this does send the message that Canada is not backing down from the legislation. Also, the government hopes that other companies in Canada will follow suit and pull their advertising off of Meta's platforms, and that other countries that are in the process of passing similar laws to protect local media will continue to do so. And if that happens, it's possible leverage will change and Meta will have to make some concessions or risk losing out on significant revenue. So you know, the argument is share a little bit now or lose out a lot later on. Though you could argue that Meta is concerned about other countries all doing this and then collectively they take a huge bite out of Meta's revenue, So we'll have to see. TikTok's lawyers have petitioned a US judge to block a Montana ban on TikTok before the ban takes effect in January first of next year. TikTok argues that this ban constitutes a violation of First Amendment rights, both for TikTok users and for the company itself. This is where I remind myself and everybody else here in the United States, corporations are legally people because for lots of reasons, actually, many of which really do make a lot of sense, but that's a discussion for another time. The Montana ban calls for fines of up to ten grand per violation if TikTok allows content to appear in the state of Montana. In other words, if if citizens are allowed to access TikTok within Montana, TikTok could be hit by ten grand the worth of fines each time. According to TikTok, more than a third of Montana's citizens are actually on TikTok, so you know, that's a lot of the state's population to cut off from the service, though in the grand scheme of things, we're talking about just three hundred and eighty thousand people here, because Montana is not a heavily populated state. How this law would actually be enforced as a pretty darn good question, and how TikTok is supposed to handle it is another one. And how the state can prevent citizens from accessing TikTok through VPNs as yet another good question. This all stems from the ongoing concern that TikTok serves as a data siphon that takes precious US citizen information and funnels it to China. That's an accusation that the company has repeatedly denied. But then there have been lots of people who have contradicted those denials, including people who formerly worked for TikTok or its parent company. So at this point I don't know who or what to believe. But as I have said many times before, in an era where our private information is collected by numerous companies and then bought and sold on the open market, taking out TikTok is kind of like if you were to plug up a small hole in a dam, and to your left and to your right are dozens of other holes that you haven't even touched. Sure, you've plugged one, but the problem is that this has been going on for a while, and it's not due to a single source. So yeah, I think the problem here is much bigger, and the issue is we've been distracted by focusing just on TikTok. France has passed a surveillance bill that has civil liberties activists highly concerned. Going back to France again, this bill allows authorities to essentially tap into citizens' devices like laptops, smartphones, their cars, any other connected gadgets they might rely upon, and to use those devices to track them and to essentially spy on them. That could even include activating a device's camera and microphone to record images and sounds of targets. This law does have some limits. It's not that the authorities can just, you know, turn it on and spy on everybody all the time. First, they have to secure permission from a judge before they can begin surveilling a subject. And they are only supposed to be able to use this tactic when quote justified by the nature and seriousness of the crime end quote. I don't know what the threshold is for a crime to be serious enough to be to warrant this kind of thing. I guess that's up to the individual judge's judgment. But yeah, that's somewhat troubling that there's not a more, you know, concrete threshold. Further, if you are a journalist, a judge, a lawyer, or a doctor, I have some good news for you. You've got some protection because those jobs do not fall under legitimate targets according to the law. This was an effort to prevent the law from being abused, so that officials could say, keep an eye out on a pesky journalist who is working on a big expose about local government or something. The law is supposed to protect people from that. If they fall into those categories, anyone outside of that, it's a different story. The law also has a time limit on how long authorities are allowed to spy on a target, which is a maximum of six months. Half the year. Seems like quite a time, and I suppose at the end of that the authorities could petition another judge to get another allowance to continue spying on people. Activists point out this is already a potentially catastrophic violation of citizen privacy and security, and furthermore, it could be the start of a slippery slope into more pervasive surveillance. As to how the government will actually achieve these results, I presume it will require the cooperation of device and telecommunications companies, because otherwise there's not like a magic button that you can push that lets you, you know, select a random citizen and then tap into all their technology. You would need some methodology to access that that stuff, which could mean either that you have to get access to the actual gadget and then install like an espionage app on there that would let you do that, something akin to what the NSO Group has done out of Israel selling it it's Pegasus package to iOS device, you know, infiltrators that kind of thing, or maybe direct work with the various telecommunications companies and gadget companies to have them cooperate with this, which I would imagine would be a tall ask, like it'd be a big, big request to get those companies to agree, because consumers don't like that kind of stuff, and if a consumer finds out that a company is in cahoots with the government to spy on people, that could be a real pr blow to a company's image. So we'll have to see how this develops, because I'm very curious how it actually gets enforced, how it actually moves forward. But even without those questions, it's a huge concern to me. I think that this is a bad step for law and for technology and for the continuation of the surveillance state. Okay, we're going to take another quick break. When we come back, I've got a few more stories to cover. Okay, we're back and ready to wrap up this news episode. I've got three more stories. First up. In New York City, City government officials have passed a law that will require hiring organizations to pay for an auditor, a third party auditor to come in and check any software that uses automated processes for the purposes of hiring. So if you are a company that either outsources you're hiring to another company, or you're using software that has automated systems to kind of sort candidates so that you can more effectively decide upon who you should hire, this applies to those companies. So the goal here is to identify any unwanted bias in the automated system that could disproportionately be disadvantageous to certain populations. Right, we have seen multiple instances of bias incorporated into automated functions. Now, most of the time this is unintentional. It's not that bias is built in on purpose, but bias can be a part of automated systems and it can still have a massive negative impact on affected individuals. So as companies lean harder on AI and automation to do things like sort through potential job candidates, it becomes really important to identify possible problems in the software so that legit job seekers aren't left out of the loop through no fault of their own and they are just discriminated against due to this, you know, systemic bias that's built into the software. So companies that do not comply with the bias audit law will face fines for violations. But these fines are are I mean, they're pretty small. They're like three hundred and seventy five bucks for the first offense, which is you know, that's nothing for most businesses. Three hundred and fifty dollars for a fence number two, and then every time after that it's fifteen hundred bucks. And by a violation, we're not talking about every instance of the use of such software. Rather, we're talking about each day a company uses an automated tool that has not yet been audited, or has been audited and found to have bias and it hasn't been addressed, or that the company has failed to inform job applicants that part of the process involves software with automated processes in it. Anything like that would count as a violation for each day, So a day ends up being a violation as opposed to an instance. So interesting that New York City has passed this, I hope to see similar laws passed in other areas. I think it is important to make certain that as we start to lean heavier on AI that we build in protections that can help prevent unintended consequences from affecting people, because we've seen it happen time and again already in other applications like facial recognition technology, for example, So we want to make sure that those are not really present for these kind of things. I mean, you don't want to be out of work and then submitting your resume and you know, cover letter and all that kind of stuff to a company and then find out that you weren't even up for consideration because some automated program had a bias in it that automatically dismissed you from consideration. That would stink. You know, you might be the perfect person for that job, it might be your passion and you never get a chance because some automated piece of software had bias built into it. So we definitely need laws like this because I don't think there's enough of a move within the companies that are making this software to stop it at the source from the very get go. In fact, a lot of times they're just not even aware of it. That's why you have to have the third party auditor come in and really check it. Out now second our penultimate story, second to last. Stephen Winkleman, the CEO or Steffan I guess I should say Stefan Winkleman, the CEO of the famous car company Lamborghini, has said that Lamborghini has now sold its last fully gas powered supercar. So it is the end of an era. From this point forward, all vehicles sold by Lamborghini will at the very least be hybrid cars, with all electric vehicles coming a few years down the road, so to speak. Now, this does not mean Lamborghini has manufactured its last gas only vehicle, and that's because Lamborghini is a company that takes pre orders on cars and then builds them to order. So this is like a luxury supercar experience. So while Lamborghini has sold its final gas drink and supercar, the car hasn't been built yet. That's still in the future. It's still an interesting footnote in history that July twenty twenty three was the month when Lamborghini sold its last gas only vehicle. It's a real mark of change. And finally, after more than two months, NASA has re established communications with the Mars based helicopter Ingenuity. This plucky little vehicle relies upon the Mars rover Perseverance to provide the communication link to NASA, But at the conclusion of its last flight, which happened more than two months ago, Ingenuity plopped down on Martian soil and a rocky hill blocked its line of sight to Perseverance, and as such there was no way for NASA to connect to the little helicopter because he needed that line of sight connection. Now Perseverance has moved into a position that allows for communication, so NASA can finally gather data from Ingenuity's fifty second flight and then check diagnostics to see if the helicopter is up for another jaunt in a couple of weeks. Ingenuity has been on Mars since early twenty twenty one. It made its first flight on April nineteenth of twenty twenty one, and originally the hope was to get five flights out of a little thing. So this sucker has punched way above its weight, having gone on more than fifty flights at this point. Ingenuity has gathered images that have helped NASA plot out the route for Perseverance, so that has been like Ingenuity's prime operational use is to kind of gather intelligence so that engineers can figure out the best way forward for Perseverance to be able to explore Mars's surface while encountering as few obstacles as possible. So here's hoping ingenuity can keep taking to the skies for a while longer yet. And that is it. That's the tech news for Thursday, July sixth, twenty twenty three. I hope you are all well and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.