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. I'm a little out of breath because if you listen to yesterday's episode you might have heard I, despite all of my precautionary behaviors, caught COVID apparently, and that's all sorts of fun. But the show, as they say, must keep going. I think I don't know. I'm on pain killer. Let's talk about the news for today, Tuesday, February eight, twenty twenty two, and let's start off with some updates to a few stories that I have talked about in recent episodes. First up, the Nvidio bid for the semiconductor company ARM is a fish lee off the table in video had been pursuing a sixties six billion dollar acquisition of ARM, the British semiconductor company, but encountered numerous regulatory obstacles along the way. Now, I mentioned last week that it looked like this deal was falling apart, and now we can definitively say that the deal fell apart. Relatively recently, we've seen regulators in regions like the European Union, the United States, and the United Kingdom become more wary of large acquisitions and mergers, particularly in the tech world, but not exclusively to tech, and the proposed acquisition appears to be a victim of increased scrutiny of such proposed deals. I'm sure this comes as something of a relief to companies like Microsoft and Qualcom, both of which depend upon ARM manufactured chips, and neither of which would want to see in video get control of that part of the fly chain. As for ARM, it's current owner, which is the Asian conglomerate soft Bank, plans to prepare ARM for an initial public offering for later in the year, that is, to spend it off as a publicly traded company. Now we might see another tug of war happen on that front, because in the UK a lot of officials are really eager to see ARM a British company listed on the UK's stock market, but soft Bank seems inclined to instead list ARM on the New York Stock Exchange, where you might see a slightly better share price value listed initially so soft Bank can make back some of the money it's spent acquiring arm in the first place. Politics and business are fun, continuing to update stories. Earlier this month, news broke that the United States Internal Revenue Service or i r S, everyone's favorite department in the US, was planning to use a third party company for the purposes of authenticating people who are trying to access some online i r S services, and they would be doing that through facial recognition technology. The plan would have required people to submit a video selfie of themselves and then use a camera either on their phone or on a webcamp to verify their identity before they would be able to use certain features on the i r S website. Critics objected to this practice pretty quickly, pointing out that facial recognition technology has often proven to be unreliable, particularly for anyone who doesn't happen to be male and white. There's a pervasive issue with bias in facial recognition. Uh some products have more of a problem with this than others. In addition, critics argue that the requirement would put an unfair burden on people who don't have the access to smartphones or webcams, and thus create a deeper digital divide between the haves and the have nots, and because you know, everyone's supposed to file taxes, that's a real problem. And then there's the concern for privacy and security that comes along with using a private, third party company to work so closely with, you know, a government service like internal Revenue. That seems to raise a few more concerns. And now the I r S has walked back its decision, saying it's going to transition away from using this facial recognition technology which had already started to roll out, and that it will quote develop and bring online an additional authentication process that does not involve facial recognition end quote. Not too long ago, I dedicated an episode of tech Stuff to talk about Peloton, the company best known for its connected exercise bikes, also does treadmills and you take online spin classes from the comfort of your own basement, I mean home. And Peloton has had a pretty dramatic fall from grace over the last few months, with the company's sales slowing dramatically after a big spike early on in the pandemic. And then there are reportedly warehouses filled with Peloton products that just haven't sold, And there are also some pr issues that were exacerbated by a couple of fictional characters suffering fictional heart attacks after working on the bikes. Because that's the kind of world we live in. I guess where fictional character's death on a show can actually put a stigma against a company anyway. John Foley, the founder of Peloton and now former CEO, announced that he was stepping down from his leadership role. Um well, that leadership role fully has led Peloton ever since he came up with the idea more than a decade ago, and he will instead become the executive chair of the board of directors, so still very much, you know, part of the company. And a man named Barry McCarthy, who had served as chief financial officer of Spotify, another company that's been the hot seat recently, will become the new president and CEO of Peloton. Peloton's current president, William Lynch, is also stepping down. Foley and Lynch aren't the only two people at Peloton who will be updating their resumes. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company expects to cut about twenty percent of its workforce. That's around two thousand, eight hundred jobs. There have also been calls from activist shareholders to sell the company in order to get a little money back for those shareholders, because of course, share prices in Peloton have dropped more than fiftent this year. Although I saw a headline just before I started recording that suggests a lot of movement on that front, so it may be different by the time you hear this. Now. I just mentioned Spotify, so let's let's talk about that for a moment. First of all, Spotify and I Heart Radio or I Heart Media are competitors, and I work for I Heeart Media. I'm saying that up front because context is important, and also to say I'm not speaking on behalf of my employer in any way. I honestly don't know what anyone official and my heart thinks about what's going on at Spotify, and there's certainly no official company position that I can point to. So this is just me here, all right. With that out of the way, Spotify has been trying to walk a tight rope over the last few weeks, all thanks to Joe Rogan. Spotify famously signed Joe Rogan to an exclusive deal for his podcast for the princely sum of one hundred million dollars. It's a heck of a deal. So to get Rogan's podcast, you had to use Spotify anyway. A couple of weeks ago, several musicians began to pull their musical catalogs off of Spotify because of Rogan's tendency to spread COVID misinformation on his show. The musicians expressed concern about the dangers this post, considering Rogan's immense popularity. So Spotify's response was essentially, you know, it's it's Joe Rogan show. We just licensed the show from him. We don't take a hand in shaping the content. We're not editors. Who he chooses to have on his show and what he talks about are all up to him. So we're just the platform and as long as he doesn't violate our rules, the content stays. Those rules, by the way, weren't public facing, Like there was no way to see whether content was violent the rules if you were outside Spotify, so you couldn't judge that. Uh. The company subsequently then published those rules, so now they are public facing, but at the time they weren't. And then artists India are pulled her music off the platform because of Rogan's history of using racial slurs on his show. She actually shared a video montage of him doing so over the course of numerous episodes, and this time Spotify swept in and had behind the scenes discussions with Rogan on the matter, and subsequently Rogan pulled down more than a hundred of his past up episodes. Now The Verge published an article about this titled Spotify is more Confused about Joe Rogan than Ever, and The Verge pointed out that the racial slurs, while horrible, don't actually seem to violate Spotify's rules as they are written. It would take some loose interpretation of the rules to say, oh, this covers racial slurs as well, not that racial slurs aren't bad, they're terrible, but rather that Spotify it didn't seem like it was a direct violation of what Spotify's rules were. So the Verge poses, why can Spotify pressure Rogan to pull down those episodes in that case but do nothing in the case of COVID misinformation? And this is a really tough situation. On the one hand, creators value having freedom and authority over their own work. I get to choose what topics I cover for my show and how I cover them. My heart does not pressure me to do otherwise. You know, I might once in a while get a Rik West like, Hey, would you do a themed episode on such and such? But I can actually say yes or no to that, and the time, whatever the topic happens to be for that day is one that I just chose myself, and it's my own way of of expressing my thoughts on those topics. However, on the other hand, spreading this information and promoting harmful portrayals of people of color or giving white supremacists of platform, which Rogan has done in the past, undeniably that causes harm. And so you're left asking is it better to place tighter restrictions on content and affect the creator's process, or is it better to have the creator be free to send out whatever message they want, even if that message is harmful. Now, as a creator, I actually think tighter restrictions are the better alternative. I mean, I value my ability to say stuff, but I don't think that ability is more important than the safety and dignity of other people. I think that's way more important than oh God, you're not letting me say this word that I shouldn't say. Um, that's my own opinion, just my own personal opinion, not again meant to be any kind of official stance on the matter. All Right, we've got some more news stories to cover, but before we get to that, let's take a quick break. According to euro News, authorities in the EU are looking at the concept of the metaverse with regard to what, if any, regulations will need to be in place to protect citizens from what some call the future of the internet. In fact, Margreeth Vettiger, and I apologize for butchering that name, she's an EU representative from Denmark, went so far as to say, quote, the metaverse is here already, so of course we want we start analyzing what will be the role for a regulator, what is the role for our legislature end quote. I actually take issue with her statement that the metaverse is here are already because no one has really defined what the metaverse is or will be. There are a lot of kind of vague ideas and proposals of what metaverse will actually mean. Whenever we have something that we can definitively point to and say that is a metaverse, and there's some examples of stuff to have elements of some of those ideas, I mean, minecraft roadblocks and even Second Life come to mind as having some aspects of what people refer to when they're talking about metaverse concepts, but none of those seem to actually encompass everything that is brought to mind when that vague term metaverse has mentioned. However, there are definitely a lot of companies rushing into the metaverse space convinced that it is in fact going to be the future of the Internet. I'm still skeptical about that personally, but I have a long history of being wrong about this kind of stuff, and besides, I'm getting older and grouchier every day, so that could be affecting my perception anyway. It's clear that EU officials are looking ahead and trying to anticipate what sort of regulations will need to be in place in order to ensure that the meta verses, whatever those turn out to be, played by the use rules about citizen data, privacy and security. The EU has been very forward on those pushing for stronger and stronger regulations and turning from the metaverse to meta You know, the company formerly known as Facebook. We have a few more stories. For one, Meta has said it might actually shut down operations in Europe for Facebook and Instagram that is, the folks in Europe may one day find they can no longer access those platforms. Now why is that, Well, it all has to do with those data privacy laws and the EU I just referenced. See Facebook currently transfers data back and forth between the UK and the United States, or really the United States and everywhere else. Like if you lived in Africa, that data would be making its way back to the United States for processing and analyzing um and so in the European Union there are these transatlantic data transfers that happens so that Facebook can quote unquote offers services to European users. And by offer services, I suspect we're not just talking about features on Facebook and Instagram, but stuff like you know, targeted advertising. That that's part of what the data is being used for. But the use data protection laws are closing off the avenues that Facebook can legally use to transfer data from the European Union to the United States, largely because there are concerns that such data transfers could end up being mined by organizations like the National Security Agency or in essay here in the United States, and that EU citizens should not be subjected to that, especially without their consent, so that's what's at the heart here. And the EU has started to shut down some of the avenues that Facebook would use to send data back and forth, so that would mean Facebook would have to silo information in the European Union, it would have to set up operations in the EU specifically to handle all that in order to keep you know, it's its services essentially the same as they are now, rather than just having it shipped over to the United States that data. So they're essentially saying, Hey, if we can't transfer data back to the United States so that we can make use of it, we can't operate in the U, so we're gonna shut down now. I should also add that REPS that Meta have said the company doesn't actually have plans to shut down operations in the EU. Instead, they're sending the message that there needs to be some sort of official structure in place so that the company can continue on with business as usual. Meanwhile, REPS and EU are essentially saying, you need us more than we need you. And in fact, Meta pulls about its ad revenue from Europe. About half of all revenue comes from North America and the remaining gets divvied up around the rest of the world. So the United States and Canada are the most important regions for Facebook when it comes to revenue, but the EU that's significant. So if Meta were not to comply, it could face some pretty significant finds in Europe. And at the moment, the matter is still one that's working its way through regulatory processes. So it may turn out this whole kerfuffle dies without much happening, but we'll have to keep an eye on it. Okay. Another story with Meta is that Peter Theel venture capitalist, who has long maintained a seat at Meta's board of directors, is stepping down from the board. Feel himself is a controversial figure, having become a prominent supporter of conservative politicians in including former US President Donald Trump. Now I say controversial because Trump of course got into hot water on Facebook and other online platforms by repeatedly violating policies of those platforms, including facebooks, and that necessitated his removal from those platforms. In fact, I think Facebook was the first one to do it. So, you know, Peter Theel being a supporter of Donald Trump, there was this question about whether his influence at the board level would cause Facebook to make bad decisions regarding its content moderation policies, and there were critics who were calling upon CEO Mark Zuckerberg to cut tiles with feel but Mark Toads didn't do that. Anyway, thel now appears to be interested in getting into politics himself, so he has stepped down from Facebook's board, which would absolutely be necessary before he could run for any kind of office without you know, tons of people jump being on his case for having conflicts of interest. Um. Yeah, So the very important figure in Facebook's history and one that has had an increasingly um prominent role in supporting politics in the United States. As for Meta's version of the Metaverse, the company has recently made a change to its virtual reality social space called Horizon. It's got a couple of different Horizon products out there, like Horizon World, and the change now creates a virtual personal space perimeter around each avatar. And you might wonder why, Well, it's because people can be really awful, particularly in online spaces. We've already seen early users of Horizon come forward with complaints that they were being harassed in virtual spaces, some of them saying that others were attempting to virtually grope at them. And you know that might sound odd or maybe even funny to you, but you know, when you think about it, really is disturbing. Like first, I mean, you have no idea what someone else has been through in their life, and a virtual action like that could be triggering. Like if someone actually has been the target of sexual harassment or assault in their past, a virtual representation of that is incredibly distressing. Beyond that, a good virtual experience is really immersive. I mean, you know, they're there therapists out there who use virtual reality to help treat people who have various phobias as a kind of immersion therapy where the the person who has like the phobia can be exposed to a virtual representation of whatever it is that triggers the fear and get more accustomed to it without having to actually go in person and experience that firsthand. Like they have that safety net of it's a virtual experience. But I can tell you people have had their bodies react just as if they were in the real situation. So we know that these virtual experiences can have real psychological effects on us. So if you are the victim of assault, it can have a real psychological effect. Even though you know You're ostensibly safely at home in say your game room or office or whatever, and nothing quote unquote real is happening to you. Um, but yeah, having people blatantly deny you your personal space is just awful. So this new system in Horizon creates a two ft radius perimeter around every avatar by default, and that is meant to set the stage for behavioral norms within the metaverse. Now, keep in mind, this is just one way people could harass one another in virtual space, right to get all up into someone else's personal space. That's one way that you could really harass somebody, But there are lots of other ones, and Meta executive have already indicated that moderating the metaverse to counteract toxicity will be difficult, and actually, according to Andrew Bosworth of Meta, if you're talking about metaverse at scale, it will be practically impossible, which does not sound particularly fun to me. Okay, we've got a few more news stories to cover before we close out, but let's take another quick break. Let us turn our attention now to Apple. The company is also coming under fire recently, as eight state treasurers in the United States have contacted the Securities and Exchange Commission or SEC over allegations that Apple has been forcing employees to sign non disclosure agreements more commonly referred to as in DA's and use them as quote unquote concealment clauses. So, in other words, the allegation is that Apple co versus employees to sign an agreement that says the employee will not reveal the existence of unlawful acts committed by people within the company or facilitated by the company itself, that you are not allowed to talk about that outside of specific uh contexts within the company itself. You could not go to a lawyer, you could not go to the press. You weren't supposed to talk about to anyone. And the letter from these state treasurers urge urges the SEC to form rules that expressly forbid companies from using India's in order to silence employees and prevent reports of discrimination, harassment, and other illegal activities from being exposed outside the company. Further, the treasurers are accusing Apple of not just using India's in this way, but also then lying about that practice because Apple has said that it does not require employees to agree to concealment clauses, and so these allegations are stating that that's categorically false, and that Apple then misrepresented that when talking to official US regulators. The Treasurers are now calling for an investigation and potentially action against Apple should those allegations prove to be true. So that's still, you know, again, working its way through that process. We don't have anything hard to report on that yet, but it does seem to be an escalation of what has been called the Apple two movement t oo like me too. Over in Europe, Apple is facing more fines. The Authority for Consumers and Markets Department in the Netherlands has issued a fine for five million euros for the third week in a row, stating that Apple has failed to comply with an order to allow dating apps to offer alternative payment systems to Apple's own in app system. This ties in with a global story of Apple racing pressure to relinquish some control of the in app experience in iOS. So, in case you're not familiar with that, Apple's policy was that developers who created apps for iOS devices had and any of them that included in app purchases would have to use Apple's payment structure. So, in other words, let's say I create a game for iOS devices, and within the game, players can purchase different skins for their character so that they have a different appearance. Well, I would have to use apples in app payment structure for that, and that would give Apple a cut of each transaction, which ranged from fifteen depending upon the size of the developer that was, you know, submitting the app app. And because Apple controls the entire ecosystem for iOS apps, you either played by Apple's rules or your app would not get carried by Apple. And of course, you know, people know that the folks who own iPhones are more prone to in app purchases than other platforms, like even though there are way more Android systems out there, the people who spend the most money are those who have iOS systems. So that would represent a pretty lucrative vein of revenue for Apple. So Apple does not want to move away from that, obviously, because that revenue is an important stream for the company. So Apple has been resisting the push in various regions. They've been appealing court decisions that have ruled against Apple, commanding the company to allow alternative payment systems, and the company has been trying to reverse this trend with even the CEO making personal calls to lawmakers, but over in the EU, regulators are not budging, and they continue to levy fines on Apple for not complying or failing to show evidence that the company is complying. The current boutafines is, as I mentioned, five million euros a week, which has a maximum of fifty million euros, which is a lot of money, but for Apple it's kind of not. I mean, Apple's revenue in one was a reported three hundred sixty five point eight billion dollars and the profit was nearly nine billion dollars. So I'm not sure how seriously Apple is taking this just yet, or if the company is just more focused on fighting the legal battle to push back against this trend and an Apple future news The company has long been rumored to be working on a vehicle design sometimes called the Apple Car we're cheekily sometimes the I Car, and recently an Apple patent revealed that the company intends to incorporate machine learning into the design of the vehicle for the purposes of autonomous operation. So essentially, the conclusion is that the processors of today are just not up to the task of handling situations that can arise while driving. They're not fast enough to react properly for every kind of driving situation that you know. It's one thing to program for, say, collision detection or you know, lane assist and that kind of stuff, but it's another thing entirely to deal with all the possible scenarios that can pop up when you're on the road. If you are a driver, chances are there has been a situation at one point or another that you've never encountered before. Humans can typically react to those things in an instinctive way that you know can be successful, but a car that is following more you know, strict programming may not be able to and that's a problem. So machine learning could allow for a fleet of cars to share their collective experiences with one another. So let's just imagine, you know, this is a hypothetical. Imagine you've got a thousand autonomous cars on the road, and most of those cars are going to have relatively uneventful drives where nothing particularly unexpected happens, so they're not learning anything. Uh, there might be a few that have something that's a little out of the ordinary, so they have the potential to learn from those experiences, and you'll have a few, very few outliers, they will have truly unusual experiences. Uh those experiences and the car's reaction to those experiences can then build into the overall fleet's knowledge base. So Car number one can learn from the mistakes of Car one thousand, and that means cars wouldn't be learning just from their own mistakes, but from the mistakes and successes of all the other cars in the fleet. Now, this gets a little scary to think about because we're talking about large, heavy, fast moving vehicles here, and the word mistake is not much fun when you're thinking about it in those terms, right, Like, a mistake can be you know, life altering, it could be fatal. But on the other hand, this represents a way to build out how cars will react in different stations that can evolve far faster than if you were just programming each scenario independently, which would take you forever because you would never be able to account for every single possibility on the road. Is just that's just not feasible. Now, I should add that Apple is not the only company that has looked into this kind of approach where you're using machine learning and a fleet of vehicles to kind of improve individual car responses, but the patent does give us a rare glimpse into the ultra secret project of an Apple Car. Finally, some Australian researchers have bad news for alien lovers out there. The researchers used a powerful radio telescope array to focus on the galactic center of the Milky Way and they listened out for any signals that could indicate alien activity. In other words, they were looking for stuff what doesn't fit into the natural radio signals you would expect to find from the galactic center. Uh. They listen for around seven hours, and the report is that all is quiet on the galactic front. Their search was within a region known to have at least a hundred forty four exo planets in it. An exo planet is a planet that exists outside of our own Solar system. Now note, an exoplanet is not necessarily a planet that exists within the so called Goldilux zone. Uh. Those are planets that are known to be in a distance that's not too far nor too close from the host star of that planet's system, and so could potentially support life at least as we know it here on Earth. I mean a lot of other factors would have to be present too for that to be true. But one of them is that, well, the planet has to be the right distance from the star, else it's going to be you know, too hot and too radiated to support life as we know it, or too cold and too dark to support life as we know it. Has to be just right. But anyway, these researchers have looked around in different sectors of the galaxy over the last decade with occasional glimpses of time on radio telescopes is really precious, so it's not like these radio telescopes are just scanning the galaxy for signs of life. They're doing all sorts of important scientific work. So it's only been here and there that the researchers have been able to make use of radio telescopes for this. But so far they have come up with bup kiss. Now does that mean we're all alone out here in the Milky Way? Well, not necessarily. Uh. The astronomers have to listen in a specific ranges of radio frequencies, which means, you know, potentially you could have communications and different radio frequency ranges and we wouldn't pick it up because we were tuned in it's like being tuned into the wrong radio station, Like you're not going to hear the song you want because you're on the wrong station. Kind of like that. But you know, we're talking about massive ranges of radio frequencies, and then there are tons of other variables to consider, a lot of them were pop arized by the Drake equation as proposed by Dr Frank Drake. That equation frames the variables that have to line up in order for there to actually be a radio communicative species out there apart from our own, I mean, and it includes stuff like you have to figure out the rate at which stars form within our galaxy, the fraction of the stars that are out there that have planets orbiting them, Then the average number of orbiting planets per star that could potentially support life, Like does the average star have that has plants? Have one too point five planets that can support life depending upon you know, the number of stars that have orbiting plants and such. Then you have to figure out the fraction of those planets that actually develop life on them. They're not just capable of supporting life, but life actually evolved. Then the fraction of those planets where the life evolved into at least one intelligent species, the fraction of those planets where the intelligent life then develops some form of communication that we would be able to detect, and then the length of time at which such civilizations exist before they're no longer able to communicate. So, in other words, like you could have an intelligent species evolved to the point of being able to communicate with radio waves, but then maybe after a certain amount of time, that species wipes itself out. It would be easy to imagine, considering the amount of conflict that we see here on Earth, it's possible that that is something that is not unique to our planet. You know, a lot of our our science fiction deals with alien races that don't have that kind of internal conflict within their own home worlds. We don't know if that's a thing. Well, we don't even know if the alien races exist, let alone you know how harmonious they are within their own species. So we don't really know the values of all those variables I just mentioned. By the way, the best we can do is make various guesses, and those guesses changed dramatically as we learn new information about our galaxy. What I think those variables do that is useful as it gives us a way to kind of conceptualize what we're up against when it comes to figuring out if there is anyone to phone home too out there. So far, sadly, it seems like the aliens are maintaining radio silence. Maybe all of our calls are going to voicemail. But you know, again, it doesn't This doesn't mean that there is no intelligent alien life within our galaxy, just that we have not found a way of detecting it if it does exist. Uh. Personally, I think it's entirely possible. There could be. I'm sure that there has to be life somewhere else. I don't think we're that special. I think that that's that. Statistically speaking, it's almost certain that there is life on other planets within our universe, certainly if not within our galaxy. I mean, just the odds seem to suggest that that has to be the case. That some of that life may have evolved into intelligence I think is also pretty likely. But we're also talking about such vast distances here that our ability to pick up on it and the time frame at which we could pick up on it, Because I remember the further out something is the more into the past we are looking when we observe that, because it takes light years to travel to us, and radio communication is traveling effectively, you know the speed of light. You know, that means that we're looking back in the past, the further out we look, and so it could mean that we're looking at a time before the intelligent life started to communicate via radio waves. Maybe it's doing it now, but we won't know that for thousands of years. So there's all these different variables to take into account. So do not lose hope, alien lovers. Just know that we haven't found the smoking flying saucer yet. That's it for this episode of tech Stuff. The news for Tuesday, February eighty two. I hope you are all well. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me. The best way is on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again. Releasing Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I 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. I'm a little out of breath because if you listen to yesterday's episode you might have heard I, despite all of my precautionary behaviors, caught COVID apparently, and that's all sorts of fun. But the show, as they say, must keep going. I think I don't know. I'm on pain killer. Let's talk about the news for today, Tuesday, February eight, twenty twenty two, and let's start off with some updates to a few stories that I have talked about in recent episodes. First up, the Nvidio bid for the semiconductor company ARM is a fish lee off the table in video had been pursuing a sixties six billion dollar acquisition of ARM, the British semiconductor company, but encountered numerous regulatory obstacles along the way. Now, I mentioned last week that it looked like this deal was falling apart, and now we can definitively say that the deal fell apart. Relatively recently, we've seen regulators in regions like the European Union, the United States, and the United Kingdom become more wary of large acquisitions and mergers, particularly in the tech world, but not exclusively to tech, and the proposed acquisition appears to be a victim of increased scrutiny of such proposed deals. I'm sure this comes as something of a relief to companies like Microsoft and Qualcom, both of which depend upon ARM manufactured chips, and neither of which would want to see in video get control of that part of the fly chain. As for ARM, it's current owner, which is the Asian conglomerate soft Bank, plans to prepare ARM for an initial public offering for later in the year, that is, to spend it off as a publicly traded company. Now we might see another tug of war happen on that front, because in the UK a lot of officials are really eager to see ARM a British company listed on the UK's stock market, but soft Bank seems inclined to instead list ARM on the New York Stock Exchange, where you might see a slightly better share price value listed initially so soft Bank can make back some of the money it's spent acquiring arm in the first place. Politics and business are fun, continuing to update stories. Earlier this month, news broke that the United States Internal Revenue Service or i r S, everyone's favorite department in the US, was planning to use a third party company for the purposes of authenticating people who are trying to access some online i r S services, and they would be doing that through facial recognition technology. The plan would have required people to submit a video selfie of themselves and then use a camera either on their phone or on a webcamp to verify their identity before they would be able to use certain features on the i r S website. Critics objected to this practice pretty quickly, pointing out that facial recognition technology has often proven to be unreliable, particularly for anyone who doesn't happen to be male and white. There's a pervasive issue with bias in facial recognition. Uh some products have more of a problem with this than others. In addition, critics argue that the requirement would put an unfair burden on people who don't have the access to smartphones or webcams, and thus create a deeper digital divide between the haves and the have nots, and because you know, everyone's supposed to file taxes, that's a real problem. And then there's the concern for privacy and security that comes along with using a private, third party company to work so closely with, you know, a government service like internal Revenue. That seems to raise a few more concerns. And now the I r S has walked back its decision, saying it's going to transition away from using this facial recognition technology which had already started to roll out, and that it will quote develop and bring online an additional authentication process that does not involve facial recognition end quote. Not too long ago, I dedicated an episode of tech Stuff to talk about Peloton, the company best known for its connected exercise bikes, also does treadmills and you take online spin classes from the comfort of your own basement, I mean home. And Peloton has had a pretty dramatic fall from grace over the last few months, with the company's sales slowing dramatically after a big spike early on in the pandemic. And then there are reportedly warehouses filled with Peloton products that just haven't sold, And there are also some pr issues that were exacerbated by a couple of fictional characters suffering fictional heart attacks after working on the bikes. Because that's the kind of world we live in. I guess where fictional character's death on a show can actually put a stigma against a company anyway. John Foley, the founder of Peloton and now former CEO, announced that he was stepping down from his leadership role. Um well, that leadership role fully has led Peloton ever since he came up with the idea more than a decade ago, and he will instead become the executive chair of the board of directors, so still very much, you know, part of the company. And a man named Barry McCarthy, who had served as chief financial officer of Spotify, another company that's been the hot seat recently, will become the new president and CEO of Peloton. Peloton's current president, William Lynch, is also stepping down. Foley and Lynch aren't the only two people at Peloton who will be updating their resumes. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company expects to cut about twenty percent of its workforce. That's around two thousand, eight hundred jobs. There have also been calls from activist shareholders to sell the company in order to get a little money back for those shareholders, because of course, share prices in Peloton have dropped more than fiftent this year. Although I saw a headline just before I started recording that suggests a lot of movement on that front, so it may be different by the time you hear this. Now. I just mentioned Spotify, so let's let's talk about that for a moment. First of all, Spotify and I Heart Radio or I Heart Media are competitors, and I work for I Heeart Media. I'm saying that up front because context is important, and also to say I'm not speaking on behalf of my employer in any way. I honestly don't know what anyone official and my heart thinks about what's going on at Spotify, and there's certainly no official company position that I can point to. So this is just me here, all right. With that out of the way, Spotify has been trying to walk a tight rope over the last few weeks, all thanks to Joe Rogan. Spotify famously signed Joe Rogan to an exclusive deal for his podcast for the princely sum of one hundred million dollars. It's a heck of a deal. So to get Rogan's podcast, you had to use Spotify anyway. A couple of weeks ago, several musicians began to pull their musical catalogs off of Spotify because of Rogan's tendency to spread COVID misinformation on his show. The musicians expressed concern about the dangers this post, considering Rogan's immense popularity. So Spotify's response was essentially, you know, it's it's Joe Rogan show. We just licensed the show from him. We don't take a hand in shaping the content. We're not editors. Who he chooses to have on his show and what he talks about are all up to him. So we're just the platform and as long as he doesn't violate our rules, the content stays. Those rules, by the way, weren't public facing, Like there was no way to see whether content was violent the rules if you were outside Spotify, so you couldn't judge that. Uh. The company subsequently then published those rules, so now they are public facing, but at the time they weren't. And then artists India are pulled her music off the platform because of Rogan's history of using racial slurs on his show. She actually shared a video montage of him doing so over the course of numerous episodes, and this time Spotify swept in and had behind the scenes discussions with Rogan on the matter, and subsequently Rogan pulled down more than a hundred of his past up episodes. Now The Verge published an article about this titled Spotify is more Confused about Joe Rogan than Ever, and The Verge pointed out that the racial slurs, while horrible, don't actually seem to violate Spotify's rules as they are written. It would take some loose interpretation of the rules to say, oh, this covers racial slurs as well, not that racial slurs aren't bad, they're terrible, but rather that Spotify it didn't seem like it was a direct violation of what Spotify's rules were. So the Verge poses, why can Spotify pressure Rogan to pull down those episodes in that case but do nothing in the case of COVID misinformation? And this is a really tough situation. On the one hand, creators value having freedom and authority over their own work. I get to choose what topics I cover for my show and how I cover them. My heart does not pressure me to do otherwise. You know, I might once in a while get a Rik West like, Hey, would you do a themed episode on such and such? But I can actually say yes or no to that, and the time, whatever the topic happens to be for that day is one that I just chose myself, and it's my own way of of expressing my thoughts on those topics. However, on the other hand, spreading this information and promoting harmful portrayals of people of color or giving white supremacists of platform, which Rogan has done in the past, undeniably that causes harm. And so you're left asking is it better to place tighter restrictions on content and affect the creator's process, or is it better to have the creator be free to send out whatever message they want, even if that message is harmful. Now, as a creator, I actually think tighter restrictions are the better alternative. I mean, I value my ability to say stuff, but I don't think that ability is more important than the safety and dignity of other people. I think that's way more important than oh God, you're not letting me say this word that I shouldn't say. Um, that's my own opinion, just my own personal opinion, not again meant to be any kind of official stance on the matter. All Right, we've got some more news stories to cover, but before we get to that, let's take a quick break. According to euro News, authorities in the EU are looking at the concept of the metaverse with regard to what, if any, regulations will need to be in place to protect citizens from what some call the future of the internet. In fact, Margreeth Vettiger, and I apologize for butchering that name, she's an EU representative from Denmark, went so far as to say, quote, the metaverse is here already, so of course we want we start analyzing what will be the role for a regulator, what is the role for our legislature end quote. I actually take issue with her statement that the metaverse is here are already because no one has really defined what the metaverse is or will be. There are a lot of kind of vague ideas and proposals of what metaverse will actually mean. Whenever we have something that we can definitively point to and say that is a metaverse, and there's some examples of stuff to have elements of some of those ideas, I mean, minecraft roadblocks and even Second Life come to mind as having some aspects of what people refer to when they're talking about metaverse concepts, but none of those seem to actually encompass everything that is brought to mind when that vague term metaverse has mentioned. However, there are definitely a lot of companies rushing into the metaverse space convinced that it is in fact going to be the future of the Internet. I'm still skeptical about that personally, but I have a long history of being wrong about this kind of stuff, and besides, I'm getting older and grouchier every day, so that could be affecting my perception anyway. It's clear that EU officials are looking ahead and trying to anticipate what sort of regulations will need to be in place in order to ensure that the meta verses, whatever those turn out to be, played by the use rules about citizen data, privacy and security. The EU has been very forward on those pushing for stronger and stronger regulations and turning from the metaverse to meta You know, the company formerly known as Facebook. We have a few more stories. For one, Meta has said it might actually shut down operations in Europe for Facebook and Instagram that is, the folks in Europe may one day find they can no longer access those platforms. Now why is that, Well, it all has to do with those data privacy laws and the EU I just referenced. See Facebook currently transfers data back and forth between the UK and the United States, or really the United States and everywhere else. Like if you lived in Africa, that data would be making its way back to the United States for processing and analyzing um and so in the European Union there are these transatlantic data transfers that happens so that Facebook can quote unquote offers services to European users. And by offer services, I suspect we're not just talking about features on Facebook and Instagram, but stuff like you know, targeted advertising. That that's part of what the data is being used for. But the use data protection laws are closing off the avenues that Facebook can legally use to transfer data from the European Union to the United States, largely because there are concerns that such data transfers could end up being mined by organizations like the National Security Agency or in essay here in the United States, and that EU citizens should not be subjected to that, especially without their consent, so that's what's at the heart here. And the EU has started to shut down some of the avenues that Facebook would use to send data back and forth, so that would mean Facebook would have to silo information in the European Union, it would have to set up operations in the EU specifically to handle all that in order to keep you know, it's its services essentially the same as they are now, rather than just having it shipped over to the United States that data. So they're essentially saying, Hey, if we can't transfer data back to the United States so that we can make use of it, we can't operate in the U, so we're gonna shut down now. I should also add that REPS that Meta have said the company doesn't actually have plans to shut down operations in the EU. Instead, they're sending the message that there needs to be some sort of official structure in place so that the company can continue on with business as usual. Meanwhile, REPS and EU are essentially saying, you need us more than we need you. And in fact, Meta pulls about its ad revenue from Europe. About half of all revenue comes from North America and the remaining gets divvied up around the rest of the world. So the United States and Canada are the most important regions for Facebook when it comes to revenue, but the EU that's significant. So if Meta were not to comply, it could face some pretty significant finds in Europe. And at the moment, the matter is still one that's working its way through regulatory processes. So it may turn out this whole kerfuffle dies without much happening, but we'll have to keep an eye on it. Okay. Another story with Meta is that Peter Theel venture capitalist, who has long maintained a seat at Meta's board of directors, is stepping down from the board. Feel himself is a controversial figure, having become a prominent supporter of conservative politicians in including former US President Donald Trump. Now I say controversial because Trump of course got into hot water on Facebook and other online platforms by repeatedly violating policies of those platforms, including facebooks, and that necessitated his removal from those platforms. In fact, I think Facebook was the first one to do it. So, you know, Peter Theel being a supporter of Donald Trump, there was this question about whether his influence at the board level would cause Facebook to make bad decisions regarding its content moderation policies, and there were critics who were calling upon CEO Mark Zuckerberg to cut tiles with feel but Mark Toads didn't do that. Anyway, thel now appears to be interested in getting into politics himself, so he has stepped down from Facebook's board, which would absolutely be necessary before he could run for any kind of office without you know, tons of people jump being on his case for having conflicts of interest. Um. Yeah, So the very important figure in Facebook's history and one that has had an increasingly um prominent role in supporting politics in the United States. As for Meta's version of the Metaverse, the company has recently made a change to its virtual reality social space called Horizon. It's got a couple of different Horizon products out there, like Horizon World, and the change now creates a virtual personal space perimeter around each avatar. And you might wonder why, Well, it's because people can be really awful, particularly in online spaces. We've already seen early users of Horizon come forward with complaints that they were being harassed in virtual spaces, some of them saying that others were attempting to virtually grope at them. And you know that might sound odd or maybe even funny to you, but you know, when you think about it, really is disturbing. Like first, I mean, you have no idea what someone else has been through in their life, and a virtual action like that could be triggering. Like if someone actually has been the target of sexual harassment or assault in their past, a virtual representation of that is incredibly distressing. Beyond that, a good virtual experience is really immersive. I mean, you know, they're there therapists out there who use virtual reality to help treat people who have various phobias as a kind of immersion therapy where the the person who has like the phobia can be exposed to a virtual representation of whatever it is that triggers the fear and get more accustomed to it without having to actually go in person and experience that firsthand. Like they have that safety net of it's a virtual experience. But I can tell you people have had their bodies react just as if they were in the real situation. So we know that these virtual experiences can have real psychological effects on us. So if you are the victim of assault, it can have a real psychological effect. Even though you know You're ostensibly safely at home in say your game room or office or whatever, and nothing quote unquote real is happening to you. Um, but yeah, having people blatantly deny you your personal space is just awful. So this new system in Horizon creates a two ft radius perimeter around every avatar by default, and that is meant to set the stage for behavioral norms within the metaverse. Now, keep in mind, this is just one way people could harass one another in virtual space, right to get all up into someone else's personal space. That's one way that you could really harass somebody, But there are lots of other ones, and Meta executive have already indicated that moderating the metaverse to counteract toxicity will be difficult, and actually, according to Andrew Bosworth of Meta, if you're talking about metaverse at scale, it will be practically impossible, which does not sound particularly fun to me. Okay, we've got a few more news stories to cover before we close out, but let's take another quick break. Let us turn our attention now to Apple. The company is also coming under fire recently, as eight state treasurers in the United States have contacted the Securities and Exchange Commission or SEC over allegations that Apple has been forcing employees to sign non disclosure agreements more commonly referred to as in DA's and use them as quote unquote concealment clauses. So, in other words, the allegation is that Apple co versus employees to sign an agreement that says the employee will not reveal the existence of unlawful acts committed by people within the company or facilitated by the company itself, that you are not allowed to talk about that outside of specific uh contexts within the company itself. You could not go to a lawyer, you could not go to the press. You weren't supposed to talk about to anyone. And the letter from these state treasurers urge urges the SEC to form rules that expressly forbid companies from using India's in order to silence employees and prevent reports of discrimination, harassment, and other illegal activities from being exposed outside the company. Further, the treasurers are accusing Apple of not just using India's in this way, but also then lying about that practice because Apple has said that it does not require employees to agree to concealment clauses, and so these allegations are stating that that's categorically false, and that Apple then misrepresented that when talking to official US regulators. The Treasurers are now calling for an investigation and potentially action against Apple should those allegations prove to be true. So that's still, you know, again, working its way through that process. We don't have anything hard to report on that yet, but it does seem to be an escalation of what has been called the Apple two movement t oo like me too. Over in Europe, Apple is facing more fines. The Authority for Consumers and Markets Department in the Netherlands has issued a fine for five million euros for the third week in a row, stating that Apple has failed to comply with an order to allow dating apps to offer alternative payment systems to Apple's own in app system. This ties in with a global story of Apple racing pressure to relinquish some control of the in app experience in iOS. So, in case you're not familiar with that, Apple's policy was that developers who created apps for iOS devices had and any of them that included in app purchases would have to use Apple's payment structure. So, in other words, let's say I create a game for iOS devices, and within the game, players can purchase different skins for their character so that they have a different appearance. Well, I would have to use apples in app payment structure for that, and that would give Apple a cut of each transaction, which ranged from fifteen depending upon the size of the developer that was, you know, submitting the app app. And because Apple controls the entire ecosystem for iOS apps, you either played by Apple's rules or your app would not get carried by Apple. And of course, you know, people know that the folks who own iPhones are more prone to in app purchases than other platforms, like even though there are way more Android systems out there, the people who spend the most money are those who have iOS systems. So that would represent a pretty lucrative vein of revenue for Apple. So Apple does not want to move away from that, obviously, because that revenue is an important stream for the company. So Apple has been resisting the push in various regions. They've been appealing court decisions that have ruled against Apple, commanding the company to allow alternative payment systems, and the company has been trying to reverse this trend with even the CEO making personal calls to lawmakers, but over in the EU, regulators are not budging, and they continue to levy fines on Apple for not complying or failing to show evidence that the company is complying. The current boutafines is, as I mentioned, five million euros a week, which has a maximum of fifty million euros, which is a lot of money, but for Apple it's kind of not. I mean, Apple's revenue in one was a reported three hundred sixty five point eight billion dollars and the profit was nearly nine billion dollars. So I'm not sure how seriously Apple is taking this just yet, or if the company is just more focused on fighting the legal battle to push back against this trend and an Apple future news The company has long been rumored to be working on a vehicle design sometimes called the Apple Car we're cheekily sometimes the I Car, and recently an Apple patent revealed that the company intends to incorporate machine learning into the design of the vehicle for the purposes of autonomous operation. So essentially, the conclusion is that the processors of today are just not up to the task of handling situations that can arise while driving. They're not fast enough to react properly for every kind of driving situation that you know. It's one thing to program for, say, collision detection or you know, lane assist and that kind of stuff, but it's another thing entirely to deal with all the possible scenarios that can pop up when you're on the road. If you are a driver, chances are there has been a situation at one point or another that you've never encountered before. Humans can typically react to those things in an instinctive way that you know can be successful, but a car that is following more you know, strict programming may not be able to and that's a problem. So machine learning could allow for a fleet of cars to share their collective experiences with one another. So let's just imagine, you know, this is a hypothetical. Imagine you've got a thousand autonomous cars on the road, and most of those cars are going to have relatively uneventful drives where nothing particularly unexpected happens, so they're not learning anything. Uh, there might be a few that have something that's a little out of the ordinary, so they have the potential to learn from those experiences, and you'll have a few, very few outliers, they will have truly unusual experiences. Uh those experiences and the car's reaction to those experiences can then build into the overall fleet's knowledge base. So Car number one can learn from the mistakes of Car one thousand, and that means cars wouldn't be learning just from their own mistakes, but from the mistakes and successes of all the other cars in the fleet. Now, this gets a little scary to think about because we're talking about large, heavy, fast moving vehicles here, and the word mistake is not much fun when you're thinking about it in those terms, right, Like, a mistake can be you know, life altering, it could be fatal. But on the other hand, this represents a way to build out how cars will react in different stations that can evolve far faster than if you were just programming each scenario independently, which would take you forever because you would never be able to account for every single possibility on the road. Is just that's just not feasible. Now, I should add that Apple is not the only company that has looked into this kind of approach where you're using machine learning and a fleet of vehicles to kind of improve individual car responses, but the patent does give us a rare glimpse into the ultra secret project of an Apple Car. Finally, some Australian researchers have bad news for alien lovers out there. The researchers used a powerful radio telescope array to focus on the galactic center of the Milky Way and they listened out for any signals that could indicate alien activity. In other words, they were looking for stuff what doesn't fit into the natural radio signals you would expect to find from the galactic center. Uh. They listen for around seven hours, and the report is that all is quiet on the galactic front. Their search was within a region known to have at least a hundred forty four exo planets in it. An exo planet is a planet that exists outside of our own Solar system. Now note, an exoplanet is not necessarily a planet that exists within the so called Goldilux zone. Uh. Those are planets that are known to be in a distance that's not too far nor too close from the host star of that planet's system, and so could potentially support life at least as we know it here on Earth. I mean a lot of other factors would have to be present too for that to be true. But one of them is that, well, the planet has to be the right distance from the star, else it's going to be you know, too hot and too radiated to support life as we know it, or too cold and too dark to support life as we know it. Has to be just right. But anyway, these researchers have looked around in different sectors of the galaxy over the last decade with occasional glimpses of time on radio telescopes is really precious, so it's not like these radio telescopes are just scanning the galaxy for signs of life. They're doing all sorts of important scientific work. So it's only been here and there that the researchers have been able to make use of radio telescopes for this. But so far they have come up with bup kiss. Now does that mean we're all alone out here in the Milky Way? Well, not necessarily. Uh. The astronomers have to listen in a specific ranges of radio frequencies, which means, you know, potentially you could have communications and different radio frequency ranges and we wouldn't pick it up because we were tuned in it's like being tuned into the wrong radio station, Like you're not going to hear the song you want because you're on the wrong station. Kind of like that. But you know, we're talking about massive ranges of radio frequencies, and then there are tons of other variables to consider, a lot of them were pop arized by the Drake equation as proposed by Dr Frank Drake. That equation frames the variables that have to line up in order for there to actually be a radio communicative species out there apart from our own, I mean, and it includes stuff like you have to figure out the rate at which stars form within our galaxy, the fraction of the stars that are out there that have planets orbiting them, Then the average number of orbiting planets per star that could potentially support life, Like does the average star have that has plants? Have one too point five planets that can support life depending upon you know, the number of stars that have orbiting plants and such. Then you have to figure out the fraction of those planets that actually develop life on them. They're not just capable of supporting life, but life actually evolved. Then the fraction of those planets where the life evolved into at least one intelligent species, the fraction of those planets where the intelligent life then develops some form of communication that we would be able to detect, and then the length of time at which such civilizations exist before they're no longer able to communicate. So, in other words, like you could have an intelligent species evolved to the point of being able to communicate with radio waves, but then maybe after a certain amount of time, that species wipes itself out. It would be easy to imagine, considering the amount of conflict that we see here on Earth, it's possible that that is something that is not unique to our planet. You know, a lot of our our science fiction deals with alien races that don't have that kind of internal conflict within their own home worlds. We don't know if that's a thing. Well, we don't even know if the alien races exist, let alone you know how harmonious they are within their own species. So we don't really know the values of all those variables I just mentioned. By the way, the best we can do is make various guesses, and those guesses changed dramatically as we learn new information about our galaxy. What I think those variables do that is useful as it gives us a way to kind of conceptualize what we're up against when it comes to figuring out if there is anyone to phone home too out there. So far, sadly, it seems like the aliens are maintaining radio silence. Maybe all of our calls are going to voicemail. But you know, again, it doesn't This doesn't mean that there is no intelligent alien life within our galaxy, just that we have not found a way of detecting it if it does exist. Uh. Personally, I think it's entirely possible. There could be. I'm sure that there has to be life somewhere else. I don't think we're that special. I think that that's that. Statistically speaking, it's almost certain that there is life on other planets within our universe, certainly if not within our galaxy. I mean, just the odds seem to suggest that that has to be the case. That some of that life may have evolved into intelligence I think is also pretty likely. But we're also talking about such vast distances here that our ability to pick up on it and the time frame at which we could pick up on it, Because I remember the further out something is the more into the past we are looking when we observe that, because it takes light years to travel to us, and radio communication is traveling effectively, you know the speed of light. You know, that means that we're looking back in the past, the further out we look, and so it could mean that we're looking at a time before the intelligent life started to communicate via radio waves. Maybe it's doing it now, but we won't know that for thousands of years. So there's all these different variables to take into account. So do not lose hope, alien lovers. Just know that we haven't found the smoking flying saucer yet. That's it for this episode of tech Stuff. The news for Tuesday, February eighty two. I hope you are all well. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me. The best way is on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again. Releasing Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.