Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio. And how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for Thursday, April twenty eight, two thousand, twenty two, and we're gonna start off with some news about Meta. The company had its first quarter report and the results gave new confidence to investors. Now you might remember that we found out that by the end of last year, Meta had seen a decline in users for the first time, and that, coupled with a couple of other tough pills to swallow, ended up being a big shadow across the company. And those tough bills included stuff like Zuckerberg acknowledging that TikTok was far more effective at a tracting young users than than Meta's properties were, including stuff like Instagram and Facebook, and that Meta had been spending billions of dollars on its Metaverse plans, but those plans are not gonna come to fruition for several years. I mean, Zuckerberg himself said it will be many years before this becomes a revenue generating part of the business. This is literally us building it out, and that meant that for a while folks were kind of seeing doom and gloom for the company because again, so much of our focus is on the short term. But now Meta reports that they saw an uptick in users this past quarter. There was actually an increase Now The Verge reports that the growth in users, while definitely being there, is still the lowest growth rate in the company's history, with the Facebook app growing by four percent in the first quarter. That company also revealed that ad revenue is likely still going to be fairly soft for the next few months, largely because of how Apple updated iOS so that users can opt out of some tracking data that Meta had been relying upon in order to deliver targeted ads. Targeted ads have super high value to advertisers, so without that guarantee, then Facebook, you know, they can still sell ads, but the targeted ads were the ones that we're bringing in the most money, so it means having to sell kind of a lower tier advertising because of this issue with Apple. Interesting to me that investors appear to be responding more to the uptick in user numbers than in the announcements that revenue might still be a bit slow. Also, Zuckerberg indicated that the company is going to ease back on some of its expenditures this year, probably because a lot of folks don't really like thinking about long term investments and they prefer to see numbers go up quarter over quarter. And Bloomberg reports that the easing off is a is a relative thing. Really that apparently the target spending for the year was somewhere around us staggering nine five billion dollars and now it's going to be somewhere closer between eighty seven and ninety two billion dollars um, which I mean, again, that's from the Bloomberg report, and that's just bonkers to me. Anyway, it continues to astound me how the company's share value can fluctuate dramatically over metrics that, at least to my eyes, don't seem to indicate actual real success or meaningful growth, like if it's not bringing in revenue, or if it's not bringing in you know, a uh an equal amount of revenue compared to the growth and users, I don't see where the value is. But then I'm not a finance person, and I fully admit that I likely just don't have a good enough understanding of investment. This is a me problem more than say, a meta problem. I guess now I do have another meta story, and this is a positive one. And I know I'm surprised too, But some researchers with Meta's AI division collaborated with researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana Champagne to tackle a hard problem that's a pun you just don't know it yet, and that problem is finding ways to make concrete that end up cutting way back on carbon dioxide emissions. There's a huge carbon footprint in concrete production. Actually did an episode about concrete not too long ago and talked about how the production of cement is a really carbon intensive process. Concrete production contributes about eight percent of all carbon dioxide emissions globally each year. So finding ways to make concrete, which is undeniably useful stuff, I mean, it's important while also cutting back on CEO two emissions would be a huge important component in our plans to achieve a carbon neutral status in the future. But a huge challenge, a huge problem is that there are multiple variables that you can tweak when you're producing concrete. You could break it down and say that concrete is essentially made up of four things. You know, it's like water, aggregate, cement, and typically some other substances that allow for the creation of concrete, which means that you can tweak those different factors, right and uh in different measurements and determine all, right, well, let's see if we put less cement in and more of this other stuff in what happens. But because you've got four variables, there are a lot of different ways to play with that, and that is one of the reasons why I can get really challenging, because you guys spend a lot of time playing around with all these different variables. So the researchers used AI to train a model on one thousand different concrete formulas and then derive what would be you know, likely to be the most efficient approach that would still yield a strong and reliable concrete. Because sometimes you can change this stuff up and you will get concrete, but it takes too long to dry, it's not as strong, and yeah, maybe it didn't create as much CEO two, but it might not be useful. So they fed all these formulas into the system, and the system itself produced new formulas and the team picked the five most promising ones to continue testing and tweaking, and they modified the AI generated formulas slightly to improve them, and ultimately the team created a new formula that could replace up to half of the cement needed to produce any given amount of concrete and instead use other materials like fly ash and slag in its place. In addition, the formula was supposed to exceed all strength metric requirements, which it did, and that meant that the concrete produced should be more than strong and resilient enough to serve as concrete while that cement requirement is still reduced dramatically. Meta then teamed up with a concrete company called Ozinga to refine this formula even further and to move into real world testing. Because it's one thing to say that mathematically this is what it means. It's another thing to actually find out in the real world. There's still more work to be done, including finding out there's a way to create this kind of concrete that drives a little faster, because that would speed up construction efforts when you're making use of this concrete. Otherwise, you have to wait for it to to cure while uh, you know, before you can start laying down more. Here's some elon musk Twitter news that has nothing to do with him buying the platform. So back in two thousand eighteen, the u S Security is an exchange commission or SEC, charged Musk with fraud after he tweeted that he had secured enough funding to take Tesla private. Uh. The SECS allegations that Musk had not actually secured such funding and that the announcement ended up having a massive effect on Tesla's stock price, and that Musk was essentially manipulating the stock market, which I should add is a big no no. So there was a lawsuit and ultimately Musk settled out of court, and in the process he signed a document that required him and Tesla to each pay twenty million dollars in civil finds. Plus Musk had to step down as chairman of Tesla's board of directors, and from that point forward he was supposed to seek pre approval for any tweets he was going to send out that related to his businesses before he actually posted them. Well, recently, Musk has been trying to get that settlement thrown out, but a federal judges said no, Dice, it stands the judge argues that the SECS allegations were fair and warranted, and that Musk has no evidence that he actually secured the funding he said he had, and that he signed this settlement voluntarily, and he must therefore abide by its rules. The judge also wrote, quote Musk may wish it were otherwise, but he remains subject to the same enforcement authority and has the same means to challenge the exercise of that authority as any other citizen. End quote. Right to repair advocates in the United States can celebrate a victory. Apple has now made self service repair for iPhone twelve and thirteen models available in the United States. That means that Apple will allow people to order repair manuals, proprietary tools needed to access Apple products, and even official Apple parts through the self service repair store. Now that's not to say that your average iPhone user is really going to be able to pop open the hood and change the air filter on their phone or whatever. You get what I mean. Making repairs will require a certain level of knowledge, skill, and expertise, so it's far more likely that independent electronics repair stores will make use of this offering, giving iPhone users options when it comes to fixing problems with their phones. Apple later plans to roll out similar offerings for Mac computers, and this is a pretty big step for Apple, which for years has attempted to maintain a walled garden and require users to go through Apple and Apple alone when it comes to repairs. So good job Apple. We've got a few more news items to get through. But before we do that, let's take a quick break down under Amazon has declined to acquiesce to the government's request to take a look see at the company's product search system and algorithms. So the government wants to see if Amazon favors its own in house products over a third party merchant products and other words, giving itself an unfair advantage in the Amazon marketplace. So this is the same accusation Amazon has faced in places like India and the United States. Amazon has refused to share that information, or at least declined to send it to the Australian government, and the company denies that it has ever given preferential treatment to its own products. That's not likely to fly for the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission for the a c c c H. Now, one thing that is very much different in Australia compared to some other markets, like specifically the United States, is that Amazon is still a relatively young player in that country, and it's in fact, it's not the largest online market in Australia. In fact, according to the a c c C, Amazon brought in just one quarter of the sales that eBay saw in Australia last year. However, the a c c C is concerned about any platform that engages in what it views as anti competitive or unfair practices, even if that platform isn't as dominant down there as it is here. Now, the only other thing I know about Amazon in Australia is that the company has seen a lot of returns of boomerangs. But then I'm led to understand that's what they're supposed to do. Related to Amazon, let's talk about Twitch, because Amazon owns Twitch. According to Bloomberg, Twitch is considering a couple of moves that could dramatically impact streamers and the experience of watching live streams on the platform. First is that it sounds like Twitch wants to encourage streamers to run more ads during live streams. Obviously, that would generate more revenue for the platform, And another possible strategy is that Twitch will change the amount of subscription revenue that streamers get to keep. So right now, if you subscribe to a Twitch streamer, let's say that you know, you've you chalk over six bucks a month in order to follow a particular streamer. The streamers keep se of the revenue generated from audience subscriptions to their channel. But according to Bloomberg, Twitch is considering dropping that down, so it's a fifty fifty split. Fifty go to the streamer and the other fifty goes to Twitch itself. That is probably not going to go over so well with the streaming community at large, certainly not for some of the more active streamers who really depend upon Twitch for their livelihood. Now, whether this might prompt an exodus from Twitch to other platforms like YouTube remains to be seen. For some, like some of the really big ones, they might be signed to exclusive contracts that lock them into Twitch for a while. Um for other ones, more moderate content creators, it may be just a question they have to ask themselves. It also may turn out that the company will reconsider these moves. They haven't yet been implemented, so there's no you know, setting stone Lan to go this way. Also in gaming, AXIOS reports that far right extremism is growing in the gaming space and that the systems present in games are not up to the task of moderating players and addressing the problem. Axis cites a couple of reports. One came from the Extremism and Gaming Research Network and it published in December two thousand one. UH. There was another report from two thousand nineteen from the Anti Defamation League, and these reports paint a pretty troubling picture. They show that more than half of the people who have experienced harassment in online multiplayer games believe that they were targeted because of things like their race, their gender, their sexual orientation, and so on. The two thousand twenty one report indicates that games are sorely lacking when it comes to ways that they can manage the problem. This sets them apart from platforms like Facebook, Twitter, you know, other social network platforms that have spent a lot of money trying to deal with this problem to varying degrees of success, but the gaming space in general hasn't done that yet. UH. There are also indications that white supremacist ideology is on the rise within the online gaming world in general, so it does paint a pretty troubling picture. It doesn't mean that you know games are bad themselves, but rather there may need to be a shift and how companies end up moderating their players in their online platforms. In Michigan, several parties led by Ford and Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners have raised one million dollars in capital funding to develop a connected roadway for the purposes of autonomous cars. So the roadway will connect Detroit to ann Arbor, Michigan, and it was previously announced in twenty twenty, but the recent news marks the first time serious money is being put towards this project. So the goal is to create a dedicated roadway for self driving vehicles, and the roadway will actually include hardware that will allow for communication between the vehicle and the underlying infrastructure. And this is something I'm really interested in. It's something that we've been talking about for years now, and that's the most self driving cars that we think about today. For the most part, they are largely self contained systems. It's like having your own PC, right and and not having it connect to anything else. The PC is able to do some incredible stuff, but it's restricted to its own abilities. So the car alone is responsible for operating the vehicle, monitoring the surrounding environment, avoiding collisions and all that kind of stuff. However, if you're able to pair an autonomous vehicle with a smart infrastructure, while the vehicles on the road can communicate with the road itself, and then also by extension other autonomous vehicles, which can allow for faster traffic, less congestion, safer operations because like everyone knows what everyone else is doing already, right, all the cars are aware of all the other cars on that infrastructure and can operate at a higher rate of speed with a much, much much lower probability of something going wrong apart from things like you know, like a flat tire. Stuff like that still obviously an issue, but that cars would be able to react very quickly and collectively, so you wouldn't have things like pile ups. Now, Obviously, building out infrastructure is time consuming, it's expensive, and it's challenging, and we already have tons of roads here in the United States, and building out, replacing or upgrading existing infrastructure, that's a that's a huge endeavor. Anyone who has lived somewhere that had massive road work being done on a local Highway knows that it can take an excruciatingly long time for that work to complete. Ill if this project in Michigan ends up being a big success, it could serve as a model for future projects leading to a more safe and effective autonomous vehicle ecosystem. Finally, over in the UK, the government is revising laws regarding public service broadcasting and these laws will now also cover streaming services like Netflix, Apple TV and more that are operating within the UK. So the rules will include a restriction on broadcasting quote unquote harmful content. Now I'm not entirely certain what constitutes harmful content, like what is defined as harmful content, but if a streaming service is found guilty of broadcasting harmful content within the UK, it can be fined up to five percent of its revenue. And it sounds to me as though the process is a viewer watches a streaming service, see something on that streaming service that the viewer believes is harmful. The viewer then contact the UK's communications regulatory agency known as the Office of Communications but better known as OFFCOM, and presumably OFFCOM would then review that material to determine if it does in fact constitute harmful content. And then take action, but I'm not entirely certain. I'll have to keep an eye on it. And that's the news for Thursday, April two thousand twenty two. Hope you're all well. If you have any questions or suggestions for me, send me a message on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff H s W. And I'll talk to you again really soon. 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.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio. And how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for Thursday, April twenty eight, two thousand, twenty two, and we're gonna start off with some news about Meta. The company had its first quarter report and the results gave new confidence to investors. Now you might remember that we found out that by the end of last year, Meta had seen a decline in users for the first time, and that, coupled with a couple of other tough pills to swallow, ended up being a big shadow across the company. And those tough bills included stuff like Zuckerberg acknowledging that TikTok was far more effective at a tracting young users than than Meta's properties were, including stuff like Instagram and Facebook, and that Meta had been spending billions of dollars on its Metaverse plans, but those plans are not gonna come to fruition for several years. I mean, Zuckerberg himself said it will be many years before this becomes a revenue generating part of the business. This is literally us building it out, and that meant that for a while folks were kind of seeing doom and gloom for the company because again, so much of our focus is on the short term. But now Meta reports that they saw an uptick in users this past quarter. There was actually an increase Now The Verge reports that the growth in users, while definitely being there, is still the lowest growth rate in the company's history, with the Facebook app growing by four percent in the first quarter. That company also revealed that ad revenue is likely still going to be fairly soft for the next few months, largely because of how Apple updated iOS so that users can opt out of some tracking data that Meta had been relying upon in order to deliver targeted ads. Targeted ads have super high value to advertisers, so without that guarantee, then Facebook, you know, they can still sell ads, but the targeted ads were the ones that we're bringing in the most money, so it means having to sell kind of a lower tier advertising because of this issue with Apple. Interesting to me that investors appear to be responding more to the uptick in user numbers than in the announcements that revenue might still be a bit slow. Also, Zuckerberg indicated that the company is going to ease back on some of its expenditures this year, probably because a lot of folks don't really like thinking about long term investments and they prefer to see numbers go up quarter over quarter. And Bloomberg reports that the easing off is a is a relative thing. Really that apparently the target spending for the year was somewhere around us staggering nine five billion dollars and now it's going to be somewhere closer between eighty seven and ninety two billion dollars um, which I mean, again, that's from the Bloomberg report, and that's just bonkers to me. Anyway, it continues to astound me how the company's share value can fluctuate dramatically over metrics that, at least to my eyes, don't seem to indicate actual real success or meaningful growth, like if it's not bringing in revenue, or if it's not bringing in you know, a uh an equal amount of revenue compared to the growth and users, I don't see where the value is. But then I'm not a finance person, and I fully admit that I likely just don't have a good enough understanding of investment. This is a me problem more than say, a meta problem. I guess now I do have another meta story, and this is a positive one. And I know I'm surprised too, But some researchers with Meta's AI division collaborated with researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana Champagne to tackle a hard problem that's a pun you just don't know it yet, and that problem is finding ways to make concrete that end up cutting way back on carbon dioxide emissions. There's a huge carbon footprint in concrete production. Actually did an episode about concrete not too long ago and talked about how the production of cement is a really carbon intensive process. Concrete production contributes about eight percent of all carbon dioxide emissions globally each year. So finding ways to make concrete, which is undeniably useful stuff, I mean, it's important while also cutting back on CEO two emissions would be a huge important component in our plans to achieve a carbon neutral status in the future. But a huge challenge, a huge problem is that there are multiple variables that you can tweak when you're producing concrete. You could break it down and say that concrete is essentially made up of four things. You know, it's like water, aggregate, cement, and typically some other substances that allow for the creation of concrete, which means that you can tweak those different factors, right and uh in different measurements and determine all, right, well, let's see if we put less cement in and more of this other stuff in what happens. But because you've got four variables, there are a lot of different ways to play with that, and that is one of the reasons why I can get really challenging, because you guys spend a lot of time playing around with all these different variables. So the researchers used AI to train a model on one thousand different concrete formulas and then derive what would be you know, likely to be the most efficient approach that would still yield a strong and reliable concrete. Because sometimes you can change this stuff up and you will get concrete, but it takes too long to dry, it's not as strong, and yeah, maybe it didn't create as much CEO two, but it might not be useful. So they fed all these formulas into the system, and the system itself produced new formulas and the team picked the five most promising ones to continue testing and tweaking, and they modified the AI generated formulas slightly to improve them, and ultimately the team created a new formula that could replace up to half of the cement needed to produce any given amount of concrete and instead use other materials like fly ash and slag in its place. In addition, the formula was supposed to exceed all strength metric requirements, which it did, and that meant that the concrete produced should be more than strong and resilient enough to serve as concrete while that cement requirement is still reduced dramatically. Meta then teamed up with a concrete company called Ozinga to refine this formula even further and to move into real world testing. Because it's one thing to say that mathematically this is what it means. It's another thing to actually find out in the real world. There's still more work to be done, including finding out there's a way to create this kind of concrete that drives a little faster, because that would speed up construction efforts when you're making use of this concrete. Otherwise, you have to wait for it to to cure while uh, you know, before you can start laying down more. Here's some elon musk Twitter news that has nothing to do with him buying the platform. So back in two thousand eighteen, the u S Security is an exchange commission or SEC, charged Musk with fraud after he tweeted that he had secured enough funding to take Tesla private. Uh. The SECS allegations that Musk had not actually secured such funding and that the announcement ended up having a massive effect on Tesla's stock price, and that Musk was essentially manipulating the stock market, which I should add is a big no no. So there was a lawsuit and ultimately Musk settled out of court, and in the process he signed a document that required him and Tesla to each pay twenty million dollars in civil finds. Plus Musk had to step down as chairman of Tesla's board of directors, and from that point forward he was supposed to seek pre approval for any tweets he was going to send out that related to his businesses before he actually posted them. Well, recently, Musk has been trying to get that settlement thrown out, but a federal judges said no, Dice, it stands the judge argues that the SECS allegations were fair and warranted, and that Musk has no evidence that he actually secured the funding he said he had, and that he signed this settlement voluntarily, and he must therefore abide by its rules. The judge also wrote, quote Musk may wish it were otherwise, but he remains subject to the same enforcement authority and has the same means to challenge the exercise of that authority as any other citizen. End quote. Right to repair advocates in the United States can celebrate a victory. Apple has now made self service repair for iPhone twelve and thirteen models available in the United States. That means that Apple will allow people to order repair manuals, proprietary tools needed to access Apple products, and even official Apple parts through the self service repair store. Now that's not to say that your average iPhone user is really going to be able to pop open the hood and change the air filter on their phone or whatever. You get what I mean. Making repairs will require a certain level of knowledge, skill, and expertise, so it's far more likely that independent electronics repair stores will make use of this offering, giving iPhone users options when it comes to fixing problems with their phones. Apple later plans to roll out similar offerings for Mac computers, and this is a pretty big step for Apple, which for years has attempted to maintain a walled garden and require users to go through Apple and Apple alone when it comes to repairs. So good job Apple. We've got a few more news items to get through. But before we do that, let's take a quick break down under Amazon has declined to acquiesce to the government's request to take a look see at the company's product search system and algorithms. So the government wants to see if Amazon favors its own in house products over a third party merchant products and other words, giving itself an unfair advantage in the Amazon marketplace. So this is the same accusation Amazon has faced in places like India and the United States. Amazon has refused to share that information, or at least declined to send it to the Australian government, and the company denies that it has ever given preferential treatment to its own products. That's not likely to fly for the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission for the a c c c H. Now, one thing that is very much different in Australia compared to some other markets, like specifically the United States, is that Amazon is still a relatively young player in that country, and it's in fact, it's not the largest online market in Australia. In fact, according to the a c c C, Amazon brought in just one quarter of the sales that eBay saw in Australia last year. However, the a c c C is concerned about any platform that engages in what it views as anti competitive or unfair practices, even if that platform isn't as dominant down there as it is here. Now, the only other thing I know about Amazon in Australia is that the company has seen a lot of returns of boomerangs. But then I'm led to understand that's what they're supposed to do. Related to Amazon, let's talk about Twitch, because Amazon owns Twitch. According to Bloomberg, Twitch is considering a couple of moves that could dramatically impact streamers and the experience of watching live streams on the platform. First is that it sounds like Twitch wants to encourage streamers to run more ads during live streams. Obviously, that would generate more revenue for the platform, And another possible strategy is that Twitch will change the amount of subscription revenue that streamers get to keep. So right now, if you subscribe to a Twitch streamer, let's say that you know, you've you chalk over six bucks a month in order to follow a particular streamer. The streamers keep se of the revenue generated from audience subscriptions to their channel. But according to Bloomberg, Twitch is considering dropping that down, so it's a fifty fifty split. Fifty go to the streamer and the other fifty goes to Twitch itself. That is probably not going to go over so well with the streaming community at large, certainly not for some of the more active streamers who really depend upon Twitch for their livelihood. Now, whether this might prompt an exodus from Twitch to other platforms like YouTube remains to be seen. For some, like some of the really big ones, they might be signed to exclusive contracts that lock them into Twitch for a while. Um for other ones, more moderate content creators, it may be just a question they have to ask themselves. It also may turn out that the company will reconsider these moves. They haven't yet been implemented, so there's no you know, setting stone Lan to go this way. Also in gaming, AXIOS reports that far right extremism is growing in the gaming space and that the systems present in games are not up to the task of moderating players and addressing the problem. Axis cites a couple of reports. One came from the Extremism and Gaming Research Network and it published in December two thousand one. UH. There was another report from two thousand nineteen from the Anti Defamation League, and these reports paint a pretty troubling picture. They show that more than half of the people who have experienced harassment in online multiplayer games believe that they were targeted because of things like their race, their gender, their sexual orientation, and so on. The two thousand twenty one report indicates that games are sorely lacking when it comes to ways that they can manage the problem. This sets them apart from platforms like Facebook, Twitter, you know, other social network platforms that have spent a lot of money trying to deal with this problem to varying degrees of success, but the gaming space in general hasn't done that yet. UH. There are also indications that white supremacist ideology is on the rise within the online gaming world in general, so it does paint a pretty troubling picture. It doesn't mean that you know games are bad themselves, but rather there may need to be a shift and how companies end up moderating their players in their online platforms. In Michigan, several parties led by Ford and Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners have raised one million dollars in capital funding to develop a connected roadway for the purposes of autonomous cars. So the roadway will connect Detroit to ann Arbor, Michigan, and it was previously announced in twenty twenty, but the recent news marks the first time serious money is being put towards this project. So the goal is to create a dedicated roadway for self driving vehicles, and the roadway will actually include hardware that will allow for communication between the vehicle and the underlying infrastructure. And this is something I'm really interested in. It's something that we've been talking about for years now, and that's the most self driving cars that we think about today. For the most part, they are largely self contained systems. It's like having your own PC, right and and not having it connect to anything else. The PC is able to do some incredible stuff, but it's restricted to its own abilities. So the car alone is responsible for operating the vehicle, monitoring the surrounding environment, avoiding collisions and all that kind of stuff. However, if you're able to pair an autonomous vehicle with a smart infrastructure, while the vehicles on the road can communicate with the road itself, and then also by extension other autonomous vehicles, which can allow for faster traffic, less congestion, safer operations because like everyone knows what everyone else is doing already, right, all the cars are aware of all the other cars on that infrastructure and can operate at a higher rate of speed with a much, much much lower probability of something going wrong apart from things like you know, like a flat tire. Stuff like that still obviously an issue, but that cars would be able to react very quickly and collectively, so you wouldn't have things like pile ups. Now, Obviously, building out infrastructure is time consuming, it's expensive, and it's challenging, and we already have tons of roads here in the United States, and building out, replacing or upgrading existing infrastructure, that's a that's a huge endeavor. Anyone who has lived somewhere that had massive road work being done on a local Highway knows that it can take an excruciatingly long time for that work to complete. Ill if this project in Michigan ends up being a big success, it could serve as a model for future projects leading to a more safe and effective autonomous vehicle ecosystem. Finally, over in the UK, the government is revising laws regarding public service broadcasting and these laws will now also cover streaming services like Netflix, Apple TV and more that are operating within the UK. So the rules will include a restriction on broadcasting quote unquote harmful content. Now I'm not entirely certain what constitutes harmful content, like what is defined as harmful content, but if a streaming service is found guilty of broadcasting harmful content within the UK, it can be fined up to five percent of its revenue. And it sounds to me as though the process is a viewer watches a streaming service, see something on that streaming service that the viewer believes is harmful. The viewer then contact the UK's communications regulatory agency known as the Office of Communications but better known as OFFCOM, and presumably OFFCOM would then review that material to determine if it does in fact constitute harmful content. And then take action, but I'm not entirely certain. I'll have to keep an eye on it. And that's the news for Thursday, April two thousand twenty two. Hope you're all well. If you have any questions or suggestions for me, send me a message on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff H s W. And I'll talk to you again really soon. 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.