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? This is the tech news for Thursday, January twenty twenty two. And uh, if you are a Roku user, you may have experienced a loss in service last night, that being Wednesday, January nineteenth, in case you missed when I had just said the date. Apparently something on the back end uh in technical terms, done messed up as several owners of Roku streaming devices and Roku television's saw their devices freeze or get caught in a reboot loop. People took to Twitter to express their frustration as their respective idiot boxes appeared to waive the white flag. Idiot boxes or what some hoity toity folks in the nineteen fifties used as a slang for television's. Apparently, some users weren't even able to use non Roku services on their Roku televisions, including stuff like video game consoles, media players like DVD and blue ray, set top boxes, or cable boxes, so the television was just defunct. Roku was able to restore services later that night. But it's another reminder that a lot of the technology we seek out today relies heavily on a back end somewhere else, and when something goes wrong in the back end, our tech stops working, which is kind of like what happens to me when my back end starts to act up. But that's probably t m I. Anyway, When we think of this, along with stuff like the one outage of a large part of Amazon Web Services, we really see how vulnerable some of our technology is to failure, and it's beyond our control. We can't do anything about it. We have to wait for someone else to fix something somewhere else. Now, all that being said, most of the time our technology works just fine because most of the companies running those back end systems are spending a lot of resources building out redundancy to minimize the chances of outages. I mean, outages are just bad for business, So this makes sense now. The outages still occasionally happen, but they haven't been too frequent, and in most cases companies have been able to resolve the issues within a few hours. So while I think it's good to reflect on how much of our tech relies on centralized systems that are beyond our control. It's good to be aware of that. I wouldn't go so far as to say we're headed toward catastrophe because of that model. Also, the specifics of what actually went raw with Roku, as at least as I record this uh, haven't been disclosed. Roku hasn't said what happened as I record this episode. I'm sure by the time this goes live will know more. The International Committee of the Red Cross has been hit with a cyber attack. More specifically, a firm based in Switzerland that provides data storage services to the Red Cross was the actual target. The Red Cross has yet to name what that firm is, which I think is an incredible courtesy to the company. The hackers gained access to personal information of more than half a million people in the process, and that includes people who are in truly dire situations, like people who are separated from their families in the wake of a natural disaster or military conflict. In other words, people who have already lost an incredible amount like in some cases everything but their lives now have had their data compromised through this attack. At the time of recording, I don't have information on who was responsible for the attack nor what their intentions were in the first place. The Red Cross says that ransomware was not a factor. The Red Cross released a statement saying the organization is committed to contacting affected individuals and informed them of potential risks they face as a consequence of this breach. So do you remember on Tuesday when we had that breaking news at the time anyway, that Microsoft was showing out more than sixty eight billion dollars in cold hard cash to purchase the video game company Activision Blizzard. If you didn't listen to that episode and you've somehow avoided that news, well surprise anyway. Microsoft has released a press statement that said the acquisition would repel the company into third place in the largest video game companies by revenue category, behind Sony Intencent. And then Bloomberg reported that Sony's stock price fell on Wednesday. That represents some twenty billion dollars of market value, which is a big old yawlsa. Now, I am no financial expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I have a gut feeling that this drop in value is strictly temporary and largely reactionary. I've seen some analysts suggest that Microsoft will turn some franchises like the popular Call of Duty series, which is one of Activision Blizzards big titles, that Microsoft will turn that into Xbox and PC exclusive titles, or at least they will contain a lot of content that's exclusive to those platforms and won't be allowed on other platforms, and that this could in turn really hurt Sony because you know, PlayStation owners wouldn't have access to that content. It will give them an incentive to switch platforms. But then, you know, I hear these arguments, but Sony has long leveraged exclusive content on its consoles, either with exclusive titles where the only place you can play those titles is on a PlayStation, or with exclusive levels or other content like That's been part and parcel of sony strategy for years, and in fact, it's done that way more frequently than Microsoft. Now that I think Microsoft wouldn't have loved to do the same thing, they just didn't have the same opportunities in many cases. And so far, at least, Microsoft is sending out the message that they don't intend to limit the platforms upon which games are appearing, so that seems to be saying We're not going to suddenly turn off these titles for PlayStation. Uh. Of course, that that message could just have the unspoken for now, you know at the end of it. Um, I don't know. It's also possible. In fact, Pole at Microsoft had have said as much that the company really just wants to get a version of Xbox game Pass on PlayStation, which would be a heck of a thing. But you know, it's a subscription based service that lets people you know, access different video games for a monthly fee instead of buying titles individually. And of course, titles can disappear from the service after a while, kind of like how some content can appear on Netflix and then suddenly be inaccessible. Cough that Mitchell and web look cough anyway, Um, it would be really interesting to see if Microsoft could get game Pass onto PlayStation. It would be away for Microsoft to make money off of a competitor's platform. That would be incredible. Um. But I suspect at any rate that we're gonna see Sony's market value recover before too long. In fact, this acquisition isn't even scheduled to close until sometime in Microsoft's twenty three fiscal year. Now, I should point out that that fiscal year actually starts July one of this year two. Uh. Microsoft fiscal year goes from July one to June each year, so fiscal year two will end June and fiscal year twenty twenty three will start July one, two. Because fiscal years and calendar years frequently don't line up. I mean, it's different for every company, but it is not unusual to see a company have its fiscal year that is significantly offset from the calendar year. Now. One of the things some folks have commented on with these Microsoft acquisitions, not just in gaming but in other fields as well, is that the company has hiking up its bridges to wade on into the metaverse competitive landscape, as nebulous and vague as that is. Meanwhile, Ken Kutaragi, who invented the PlayStation, a former Sony executive, has expressed some skepticism about the metaverse concept, saying I can't see the point of doing it, and y'all know me. Y'all know I side with Kutaragi on this one, but I also admit that my lack of enthusiasm about the metaverse could totally be because I have blinders on and I'm just not seeing the big picture. Uh. That's I totally confess that could be the case. I don't see it, but that doesn't mean that there's not something to be seen. Uh. In fact, there's a lot of stuff out there that gains a lot of traction that just baffles me, and it proves to me that I'm one of those folks who gets more and more out of touch as I get older. It's that's I'm aware of it, and I cannot stop it because I see stuff go popular and I think I don't get it. But this isn't about me anyway. Kudaragi like in the metaverse, which people will, you know, presumably inhabit virtual spaces and be represented by an avatar to stand in for their physical buddy. He compared that to anonymous message board sites. Kutaragi appeared to be saying that, you know, it's just a technological way to pretend to be someone who you are not. And when you put it that way, I can actually totally see how the metaverse could potentially get super popular because we've already seen social networking sites flourish as people use those sites to create an image of their own lives that isn't necessarily a reflection of reality. You know, it's kind of a presentation of their idealized life, and it's leaving out all the messy stuff and all the mundane stuff. Um. You know, so many Instagrammers out there have kind of cultivated this aura of being special and constantly blessed with good fortune, you know, taking photos of themselves and exotic locations with like expensive surroundings and you know, in great lighting, and they look perfect, and they're using filters to make them look even more perfect. It's become, you know, a whole trope. And in fact, it's also a concern for folks who worry about young kids, especially girls and young women, who might experience mental health problems as they encounter this presentation of a seemingly perfect life and they're comparing their own lives negatively to that fake really example, So yeah, in that respect, I could see how the metaverse could take off, right where everyone says, finally I can present to the world a version of myself that I wish I were, as opposed to this sack of meeting bones that I am. And meanwhile, I'm sitting here thinking like I'm okay being a sack of meeting bones. I'll just I'll be a grumpy hermit in the ldite forest. I suppose uh, because this is not a selling point for me. But um yeah, that seems to be what Kutaragi is saying. I could be reading way too much into that. I I admit I got a lot of baggage when it comes to the concept of the metaverse. Okay, we've got lots of other stories to cover, but before we get to those, let's take a quick break. So before the break, you know, we were talking about the metaverse, and of course we're not done yet, because that is the topic in early two. I sure hope by the end of this year people aren't talking about as much, but I think that might be a hope in vain. But PC Gamer and several other outlets have reported that meta slash Facebook holds a bunch of patents that may point toward how the company will leverage certain technologies uh and the metaverse to make truckloads more money, mainly through advertising. So those patents include a lot of stuff about haptic feedback and tracking user movement, so a lot of stuff about how a user will interact with a virtual environment. How that virtual environment will be able to detect act what the users doing and thus render it so that it makes sense within the virtual environment. And beyond that, it's supposed to, you know, kind of help the virtual environment understand why where someone is looking. And you can see why that would be important, right because it needs to present to the viewer an appropriate image. If I'm you know, standing around and I'm turning my head left and right, well the virtual environment better reflect that or else it's going to be a terrible experience, probably make me sick, and I'll never want to do it again. But some of the tech that is covered by the patents includes eye tracking stuff, so that the system running the show knows not just where your head is pointed, but exactly what you're looking at, like what are you looking at within your field of view? Not just you know where you're pointed to. And there are a lot of legit reasons to want that tech in a virtual environment. For one, thing, that can really teach developers what people are focusing on, which can lead to improvements behind the scenes. You know, you can look at those analytics and say, all right, well, what's working and what's not working. Maybe developers have created something really cool in that virtual environment, but it's being overlooked. It's not getting any attention. And it's not that the thing they created was bad, it's just for whatever reason, the way it's positioned or whatever, is not getting people's attention. So maybe that means developers should either not dedicate their resources to building out similar stuff in the virtual world, that it would just be a waste of time, or maybe it would let them know that, hey, we need to do something different with this asset because it could have an impact. It's just not having an impact here. So those are like legit reasons to use eye tracking. But of course another major application of eye tracking tech is to figure out where you might best serve ads to inhabitants in the metaverse. You might say, where are people looking a lot, Let's make sure we put ads where people are looking, because then we can use the data, the eye tracking data, and go to advertisers and say, look, if you put an ad up in this spot in the metaverse, x number of people are guaranteed to see it every month, and thus we can charge bookoos of money for you to have an ad place there and This kind of makes me think of films like Minority Report. They're little sequences in Minority Report where we see people encounter digital ads all around them as they're just navigating through their day. And I can see this tech being used for stuff like augmented reality headsets, not just virtual reality, which you know, depending on the application of augmented reality, using eye tracking tech could be really cool and useful. But I suspect a lot of focus no pun intended, we'll be on how to monetize the capabilities, and uh, you know, companies like Meta already kind of know what you look at anyway, right, So yeah, this this definitely sounds creepy because the idea of them analyzing where you're looking sounds really invasive. But let me let you in on a little secret because based on your browsing habits and how much time you spend on social networks, MENA already knows what you're looking at. Really, they already know what you're interested in. Um, they already know what you're not interested in based upon your behaviors. Like that kind of data can be analyzed and they know how to target you specifically. The browsing data and habits give pretty much all the information needed, so the eye tracking thing just becomes a more overt way of doing that and provides a more precise way of implementing ads. But let me tell you the creepy surveillance stuff that's already out there that exists. That is the Facebook of today, and you don't need eye tracking software too or hardware to make that happen. Happy Thursday, y'all. On Monday this week, hackers compromised a cryptocurrency trading platform called crypto dot com and they were able to make off with around thirty four million dollars worth of cryptocurrency. That is a heck of a bank heist. The company recently copped to the hack in a blog post, and it had halted withdrawals for about fourteen hours for all users and send on a message that essentially said, hey, y'all, it's tot's okay. Your money is safe. But for four three customers that wasn't really the case, at least not temporarily, because it was their accounts that got hit and the hackers were able to drain some of those accounts. Crypto dot Com forced all users to reset their two factor authentication methods so that they can access to their accounts. I've talked about two factor authentication lots of times in the past for those who are not really familiar with what that means. It means you need you need two different ways of authenticating who you are in order to access something, and it falls into different buckets. And typically we think of those buckets as being something you possess, like say your phone, uh, something you know like a password, and something you are like biometric data that's related to some unique physical feature that you have, and that you need to provide one from one of those from at least two categories for to be able to access whatever it is. So commonly this is something where it's like your password and then you get a text message on your phone with like a six digit key, and it's only when you provide both of those pieces of information that you can gain access to your account. To factor authentication or multi factor authentication is very smart. You want to use it, if it's available, you want it turned on. I know it can be a half soul, but it is superior to just relying on a single factor. However, as interesting as it is that you know crypto dot Com told all its users you need to reset your two factor authentication. It appears that the hackers were able to access those four three accounts without using two factor authentication in the first place. So I don't know all the details about the hack, but if that's the case, if the hackers were getting access to stuff and they weren't having to use two factor authentication, that's kind of like saying, hey, you know, I know your house was robbed the other night, so we've replaced all the locks on your front door, and it turns out that the thieves came in through the window. Like, Okay, well, I'm glad the door is more secure. But if that's not how the the information or in this case, the money was accessed, then that's not really a solution. However, to the company's credit, it did cover the losses experienced by each of those four accounts. It restored the money in whatever cryptocurrency form it was in to all FOE accounts, presumably under crypto dot COM's own expense, and the hackers are reportedly in the middle of using various crypto apps to launder the money they've stolen. What a world. Okay, we're gonna take another quick break when we come back we're gonna have a butt load of Google news as well some other stuff. Okay, time to transition into the Google heavy portion of the news for today. First up, Alphabet CEO Sandar Pichai, along with Apple CEO Tim Cook have reportedly been making the rounds with lawmakers in the US, arranging private phone calls to talk with senators about stuff. And you might wonder why, Well, it's because of a piece of proposed legislation called the American Innovation and Choice Online Act that could potentially really shake things up for some big tech companies like Apple and Google and Amazon. Part of that act focuses on the practice of a company promoting its own products over competitors in the company's various marketplaces. So let's stick with Google. So this would mean that Google would not be allowed to give its own products and services a promotional advantage in Google ads on Google platforms like Search. Apple wouldn't be able to do the same thing with Apple products and services on Apple platforms, And of course Amazon has been dingd for this multiple times, with the company being accused of promoting its own products over that of competitors on the Amazon marketplace. So if this legislation were to pass, that would be a huge threat to the current business models that these big tech companies rely upon. It's one of the big ways these companies become so gargantuan in the first place, and competitors say the practice is you know, completely unfair, and even if the competitor were to offer a superior product at a superior price, they are at a promotional disadvantage. Whether the tech CEOs are making headway with the senators, that's hard to say. I mean, money talks, especially in politics, So it's entirely possible that you know, these CEOs are persuading enough lawmakers to oppose or amend the legislation to the point that it doesn't really do anything um And of course, again this is proposed legislation. It's not like it's been voted on yet. But there's definitely a growing resentment toward big tech from multiple sectors, including the common populace, and it has been growing for some time now. So there might be some pressure from constituents for some of these senators to kind of stick to their guns and pass the legislation. We'll have to wait and see if that comes to pass. In other Google news, the company is reportedly establishing a new business unit. This one focuses on blockchain and distributed computing and data storage technologies like future ones. And this is according to Bloomberg, which published that the the outlet had received a leaked email from within the company revealing the fact that they have established this blockchain business unit. Now, does this mean that Google is going to launch its own cryptocurrency in the future, or that maybe, you know, Android users or Chrome users are going to be flooded with ads for Google and f t s. I don't know. I hope not, but I can't say for certain. But it is at least an early indicator that Google is experimenting with more technologies associated with stuff like the concept of Web three and the metaverse. Google has already obviously been working with virtual reality and augmented reality applications. I mean, Google Glass was a very early a R commercial product, had a very limited commercial run, but it was something like that. So Google certainly has been dipping its toe in various disciplines that are converging towards this metaverse concept. And I'm thinking this might be just sort of a way for Google to stay involved in the game. I don't see Google as a company that's going to lead the way in that space. But I also see it as a company that doesn't want to find itself completely left out. Google has a dominant position, some might call it a monopolistic position when it comes to certain things like like search and ad revenue or add ad services um and I'm sure the company is thinking, well, we want to future proof that. We don't want to make sure. We want to make sure that the next stage of the Web, whatever it may be, doesn't cut us out of it. So that's what I see this as. I don't see it necessarily as an indication that we're going to, you know, see a Google version of crypto anytime soon, although that could happen, I just I'm not seeing it right now. And for a long time, Google has offered a service in its g Suite product that gives you the chance to create a custom domain built on top of Google, and that gives you a lot of different options, including you can have a Gmail address that isn't a Gmail address, I mean it is Gmail, but the domain like it could be a custom one. Like I could have a Gmail address that has the domain Jonathan Strickland is awesome dot com instead of Gmail dot com. Not that I have an account with that domain, but I could if I wanted to, and if it were available anyway. From the moment the Google offered that service up through two thousand and twelve, there was a free basic version of the product, so you could enroll, you could get that custom domain. You didn't have to spend any money, and it was the bare bones version, but it existed, and uh, if you ponied up the cash, then you could get access to other extra features. Yeah, that basic service was free of charge. But then in two thousand twelve, Google stopped offering it for free, but it also allowed those who had established a free account to keep using it. Now, a decade later, the company has made the decision to come to each one of those users who still has an established free account and have for years, and now Google is going to say you must pay tribute. We will burn your domain to the ground and so salt into the earth. Okay, not not that, but it's the gist of what they're saying. So for the folks who did get in early, while those free days are coming to an end, and then they will have to either pay or they will see their accounts suspended starting on May first. Anyone with a free account but who has billing information attached to their Google account will then be upgraded quote unquote to the paid service automatically, which is fun times and starting in July, those accounts will start to get billed every month for continued use of the service. If an account does not have billing information attached to it, and if the user hasn't you know, updated their account to have billing infoe attached by July one, their account will be suspended. This is a pretty tough pill to swallow. To have a free service suddenly switch up on you like that. That's never fun. On a slightly more fun note, Google has launched a beta program in South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and people in those regions can get beta access to a Google Play Games app on Windows eleven. Google had previously committed to bringing Android games to Windows eleven back in December, and when does eleven includes an Android app layer that's supposed to make this seamless. There's been some use of Google apps onto Windows platforms in the past, but this is supposed to make it really work. Uh. At first, I was like, this doesn't interest me, And then I thought, hum, if I have some Windows eleven machines, that means I could play Marvel Puzzle Quest on a PC and have my progress SYNCD across all devices. And I started to come around to it because that's actually the only Android game I currently have installed on my phone. And I know I people will tell me that's not even a good one. I don't care. I play it pretty much every day. Um Google has said it will expand this to other regions throughout two but it has yet to release a timeline for that rollout. Amazon is continuing to build on its presence in the brick and mortar world. The company had already opened up a few of its famous grocery stores, as well as purchased the Whole Foods chain, and I had a couple of brick and mortar bookstores. Now. Amazon has announced that it will open a clothing store in Glendale, California, later this year called Amazon Style, and the store will cover clothing from a number of different designers at different price points, everything from budget to high level designers, and the company says that the stores will incorporate technology on a pretty fundamental level and customers will interact with that technology using their smartphones. So Amazon says it will reserve floor space to display items, so there won't be any racks of clothes there. Instead, you'll see an example of an outfit and uh way to scan that outfit presumably, so use your phone, you scan the outfit, and then you can use the app to select you know, the size you want, the color you want, the style you want of whatever it is, and have it sent to a fitting room or even to a pickup counter um anyway, then you could go to the fitting room and try on the items. And in the fitting rooms they're gonna have touch screens where let's say you get in there and you try something on, like I don't know, you want to get those pleather chaps you see on the show floor, and you have some sent to the fing room, and you go back there and you say, yeah, these are just a little too loose. They don't give them took us the own f I was hoping for, And you could use the touch screen to request a smaller size of pleather chaps to be sent to the fitting room, so you can really get that lift that you wanted. You might wonder why I picked pleather chaps so back in Oh, I don't know, more than twenty years ago, I was in a play where I had to wear pleather chaps. So it's just one of those things pops up in your head every now and then. Anyway, Uh. Amazon also plans to use its palm scanning technology that's used in other stores to link customer accounts to specific customers, so you could, you know, pick out the stuff that you want to go to the pickup counter, scan your palm, and you would automatically have the price of your purchases deducted from your account. Now, as someone who hates to shop for clothing at all, none of this appeals to me, but I could easily imagine it being excited to folks who aren't, you know, a grumpy chaps like myself. Twitch, another Amazon property, published an open letter from the company's Vice president of Global Trust and Safety, Angela Hessian, to lay out how the platform has recently been tackling issues of abuse on Twitch, and one of the measures was that Twitch deleted millions of automated butts in order to curtail what are called hate raids. Now, if you're not familiar with Twitch, you might not be aware of raids in general. Twitch is a live streaming platform mainly geared towards video games, but there are other types of content on Twitch as well, and raids don't necessarily have to be negative. In fact, a raid can be really uplifting and awesome. So essentially, a raid is when someone directs their audience to another streamer. So you might have like popular streamers who have thousands and thousands of people watching at a time, and sometimes they like to do this to give kind of like a crazy short term boost to lesser known or sometimes outright obscure streamers who are on the platform. So you could have someone who's really influential on Twitch come across a person that they like, but that person has very few viewers of their own, and then the popular person will say, hey, let's go show them some love and open up a link to that other, you know person's stream and send floods of enthusiastic fans to go and you know, show some love. Well. I hate raid is obviously a much nastier beast as the name implies. This is when a streamer gets hit with a flood of abusive accounts hurling awful trash and chat and generally just being terrible people. And of course the you know, the people who are disproportionately the target of these kinds of attacks tend to be, you know, people of color, or people who are in the l g B t Q plus community, or women, those tend to be the most frequent targets of this kind of abuse. So Twitch has deleted millions of bots that were essentially programmed to just spread misery and abuse, which I think is definitely a step in the right direction. Now, it's upsetting that anyone would go to the trouble to set a bot loose with this kind of intent in the first place. But those are much deeper social problems that I don't expect a company like Twitch to solve because it can't. But seeing Twitch try to mitigate the you know, implementation of that problem is a good thing. Not that the problem is going to go away or even necessarily get better. People who are determined to be hateful and nasty and harmful will always find ways to do that. Now, hopefully Twitch can make that hard enough and frustrating enough that most evil trolls out there won't stick it out to see it through. Uh, I mean, come on, there are better things for you to do with your time than try to torture someone else. And finally, in news that for me falls into the I'll believe it when I see it category, the young Company Space Entertainment Enterprise or c s E has announced plans that will build and operate a space station module that will include a content studio as well as a sports arena by December of twenty four. Now SEE is the company that's working with Tom Cruise on an upcoming space movie with scenes that will actually be shot in space, because apparently that will add authenticity to something, and and apparently Tom Cruise won't be satisfied with, you know, the crazy stuff he's done in order to make a movie in the past. He has to top it every time, so instead of hanging outside an airplane, he has to go into space. Anyway, this is all going to be part of axioms space station modules. Those, in turn will be connected to the International Space Station on a temporary basis. Axiom secured permission from NASA back in to build out modules for the I s S that will have a private commercial purpose, and the eventual plan is that the Axiom modules will detach from the International Space station, and then Axiom will have its own space station, its own independence station down the line when it's time to sunset the old International Space Station, which is well pasted its expiration date its original expiration date anyway for some of the modules. But you know, it's been an operation for quite some time and expected to continue for the next few years at least. Now. Maybe I'm being way too pessimistic here. It's entirely possible that we will see this module dedicated to content creation and uh space sports by the end of I don't know what kind of space sports. I do know they will definitely be the kind I'll never be able to do, for lots of reasons, among which are my lack of athletic ability and my suspicion that going up there would cost more than I will ever make in my lifetime. More fun times, but it is kind of cool. And you know what, it's Axiom that's actually building out this module, which I think is going to be called C one. And because axioms already in the process of building out modules, and these are inflatable modules as well, um they they use air to hold a firm shape in space. Because of that, it's it's actually not maybe that far fetched to think that it will be ready by It just seems like an incredibly aggressive plan. But then these plans could have been in the works for ages and we're just now being let in on it. Um. I just whenever anything involves space, I automatically think any deadline you hear is more of a suggestion. Other evidence to point to that the James Webb Space Telescope, which was supposed to launch like more than twenty years ago, I think, And finally did um always good to put an asterisk next to those dates. That's it for the news for Thursday, January two. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover on tech Stuff, feel free to reach out to be on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon Y. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from 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? This is the tech news for Thursday, January twenty twenty two. And uh, if you are a Roku user, you may have experienced a loss in service last night, that being Wednesday, January nineteenth, in case you missed when I had just said the date. Apparently something on the back end uh in technical terms, done messed up as several owners of Roku streaming devices and Roku television's saw their devices freeze or get caught in a reboot loop. People took to Twitter to express their frustration as their respective idiot boxes appeared to waive the white flag. Idiot boxes or what some hoity toity folks in the nineteen fifties used as a slang for television's. Apparently, some users weren't even able to use non Roku services on their Roku televisions, including stuff like video game consoles, media players like DVD and blue ray, set top boxes, or cable boxes, so the television was just defunct. Roku was able to restore services later that night. But it's another reminder that a lot of the technology we seek out today relies heavily on a back end somewhere else, and when something goes wrong in the back end, our tech stops working, which is kind of like what happens to me when my back end starts to act up. But that's probably t m I. Anyway, When we think of this, along with stuff like the one outage of a large part of Amazon Web Services, we really see how vulnerable some of our technology is to failure, and it's beyond our control. We can't do anything about it. We have to wait for someone else to fix something somewhere else. Now, all that being said, most of the time our technology works just fine because most of the companies running those back end systems are spending a lot of resources building out redundancy to minimize the chances of outages. I mean, outages are just bad for business, So this makes sense now. The outages still occasionally happen, but they haven't been too frequent, and in most cases companies have been able to resolve the issues within a few hours. So while I think it's good to reflect on how much of our tech relies on centralized systems that are beyond our control. It's good to be aware of that. I wouldn't go so far as to say we're headed toward catastrophe because of that model. Also, the specifics of what actually went raw with Roku, as at least as I record this uh, haven't been disclosed. Roku hasn't said what happened as I record this episode. I'm sure by the time this goes live will know more. The International Committee of the Red Cross has been hit with a cyber attack. More specifically, a firm based in Switzerland that provides data storage services to the Red Cross was the actual target. The Red Cross has yet to name what that firm is, which I think is an incredible courtesy to the company. The hackers gained access to personal information of more than half a million people in the process, and that includes people who are in truly dire situations, like people who are separated from their families in the wake of a natural disaster or military conflict. In other words, people who have already lost an incredible amount like in some cases everything but their lives now have had their data compromised through this attack. At the time of recording, I don't have information on who was responsible for the attack nor what their intentions were in the first place. The Red Cross says that ransomware was not a factor. The Red Cross released a statement saying the organization is committed to contacting affected individuals and informed them of potential risks they face as a consequence of this breach. So do you remember on Tuesday when we had that breaking news at the time anyway, that Microsoft was showing out more than sixty eight billion dollars in cold hard cash to purchase the video game company Activision Blizzard. If you didn't listen to that episode and you've somehow avoided that news, well surprise anyway. Microsoft has released a press statement that said the acquisition would repel the company into third place in the largest video game companies by revenue category, behind Sony Intencent. And then Bloomberg reported that Sony's stock price fell on Wednesday. That represents some twenty billion dollars of market value, which is a big old yawlsa. Now, I am no financial expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I have a gut feeling that this drop in value is strictly temporary and largely reactionary. I've seen some analysts suggest that Microsoft will turn some franchises like the popular Call of Duty series, which is one of Activision Blizzards big titles, that Microsoft will turn that into Xbox and PC exclusive titles, or at least they will contain a lot of content that's exclusive to those platforms and won't be allowed on other platforms, and that this could in turn really hurt Sony because you know, PlayStation owners wouldn't have access to that content. It will give them an incentive to switch platforms. But then, you know, I hear these arguments, but Sony has long leveraged exclusive content on its consoles, either with exclusive titles where the only place you can play those titles is on a PlayStation, or with exclusive levels or other content like That's been part and parcel of sony strategy for years, and in fact, it's done that way more frequently than Microsoft. Now that I think Microsoft wouldn't have loved to do the same thing, they just didn't have the same opportunities in many cases. And so far, at least, Microsoft is sending out the message that they don't intend to limit the platforms upon which games are appearing, so that seems to be saying We're not going to suddenly turn off these titles for PlayStation. Uh. Of course, that that message could just have the unspoken for now, you know at the end of it. Um, I don't know. It's also possible. In fact, Pole at Microsoft had have said as much that the company really just wants to get a version of Xbox game Pass on PlayStation, which would be a heck of a thing. But you know, it's a subscription based service that lets people you know, access different video games for a monthly fee instead of buying titles individually. And of course, titles can disappear from the service after a while, kind of like how some content can appear on Netflix and then suddenly be inaccessible. Cough that Mitchell and web look cough anyway, Um, it would be really interesting to see if Microsoft could get game Pass onto PlayStation. It would be away for Microsoft to make money off of a competitor's platform. That would be incredible. Um. But I suspect at any rate that we're gonna see Sony's market value recover before too long. In fact, this acquisition isn't even scheduled to close until sometime in Microsoft's twenty three fiscal year. Now, I should point out that that fiscal year actually starts July one of this year two. Uh. Microsoft fiscal year goes from July one to June each year, so fiscal year two will end June and fiscal year twenty twenty three will start July one, two. Because fiscal years and calendar years frequently don't line up. I mean, it's different for every company, but it is not unusual to see a company have its fiscal year that is significantly offset from the calendar year. Now. One of the things some folks have commented on with these Microsoft acquisitions, not just in gaming but in other fields as well, is that the company has hiking up its bridges to wade on into the metaverse competitive landscape, as nebulous and vague as that is. Meanwhile, Ken Kutaragi, who invented the PlayStation, a former Sony executive, has expressed some skepticism about the metaverse concept, saying I can't see the point of doing it, and y'all know me. Y'all know I side with Kutaragi on this one, but I also admit that my lack of enthusiasm about the metaverse could totally be because I have blinders on and I'm just not seeing the big picture. Uh. That's I totally confess that could be the case. I don't see it, but that doesn't mean that there's not something to be seen. Uh. In fact, there's a lot of stuff out there that gains a lot of traction that just baffles me, and it proves to me that I'm one of those folks who gets more and more out of touch as I get older. It's that's I'm aware of it, and I cannot stop it because I see stuff go popular and I think I don't get it. But this isn't about me anyway. Kudaragi like in the metaverse, which people will, you know, presumably inhabit virtual spaces and be represented by an avatar to stand in for their physical buddy. He compared that to anonymous message board sites. Kutaragi appeared to be saying that, you know, it's just a technological way to pretend to be someone who you are not. And when you put it that way, I can actually totally see how the metaverse could potentially get super popular because we've already seen social networking sites flourish as people use those sites to create an image of their own lives that isn't necessarily a reflection of reality. You know, it's kind of a presentation of their idealized life, and it's leaving out all the messy stuff and all the mundane stuff. Um. You know, so many Instagrammers out there have kind of cultivated this aura of being special and constantly blessed with good fortune, you know, taking photos of themselves and exotic locations with like expensive surroundings and you know, in great lighting, and they look perfect, and they're using filters to make them look even more perfect. It's become, you know, a whole trope. And in fact, it's also a concern for folks who worry about young kids, especially girls and young women, who might experience mental health problems as they encounter this presentation of a seemingly perfect life and they're comparing their own lives negatively to that fake really example, So yeah, in that respect, I could see how the metaverse could take off, right where everyone says, finally I can present to the world a version of myself that I wish I were, as opposed to this sack of meeting bones that I am. And meanwhile, I'm sitting here thinking like I'm okay being a sack of meeting bones. I'll just I'll be a grumpy hermit in the ldite forest. I suppose uh, because this is not a selling point for me. But um yeah, that seems to be what Kutaragi is saying. I could be reading way too much into that. I I admit I got a lot of baggage when it comes to the concept of the metaverse. Okay, we've got lots of other stories to cover, but before we get to those, let's take a quick break. So before the break, you know, we were talking about the metaverse, and of course we're not done yet, because that is the topic in early two. I sure hope by the end of this year people aren't talking about as much, but I think that might be a hope in vain. But PC Gamer and several other outlets have reported that meta slash Facebook holds a bunch of patents that may point toward how the company will leverage certain technologies uh and the metaverse to make truckloads more money, mainly through advertising. So those patents include a lot of stuff about haptic feedback and tracking user movement, so a lot of stuff about how a user will interact with a virtual environment. How that virtual environment will be able to detect act what the users doing and thus render it so that it makes sense within the virtual environment. And beyond that, it's supposed to, you know, kind of help the virtual environment understand why where someone is looking. And you can see why that would be important, right because it needs to present to the viewer an appropriate image. If I'm you know, standing around and I'm turning my head left and right, well the virtual environment better reflect that or else it's going to be a terrible experience, probably make me sick, and I'll never want to do it again. But some of the tech that is covered by the patents includes eye tracking stuff, so that the system running the show knows not just where your head is pointed, but exactly what you're looking at, like what are you looking at within your field of view? Not just you know where you're pointed to. And there are a lot of legit reasons to want that tech in a virtual environment. For one, thing, that can really teach developers what people are focusing on, which can lead to improvements behind the scenes. You know, you can look at those analytics and say, all right, well, what's working and what's not working. Maybe developers have created something really cool in that virtual environment, but it's being overlooked. It's not getting any attention. And it's not that the thing they created was bad, it's just for whatever reason, the way it's positioned or whatever, is not getting people's attention. So maybe that means developers should either not dedicate their resources to building out similar stuff in the virtual world, that it would just be a waste of time, or maybe it would let them know that, hey, we need to do something different with this asset because it could have an impact. It's just not having an impact here. So those are like legit reasons to use eye tracking. But of course another major application of eye tracking tech is to figure out where you might best serve ads to inhabitants in the metaverse. You might say, where are people looking a lot, Let's make sure we put ads where people are looking, because then we can use the data, the eye tracking data, and go to advertisers and say, look, if you put an ad up in this spot in the metaverse, x number of people are guaranteed to see it every month, and thus we can charge bookoos of money for you to have an ad place there and This kind of makes me think of films like Minority Report. They're little sequences in Minority Report where we see people encounter digital ads all around them as they're just navigating through their day. And I can see this tech being used for stuff like augmented reality headsets, not just virtual reality, which you know, depending on the application of augmented reality, using eye tracking tech could be really cool and useful. But I suspect a lot of focus no pun intended, we'll be on how to monetize the capabilities, and uh, you know, companies like Meta already kind of know what you look at anyway, right, So yeah, this this definitely sounds creepy because the idea of them analyzing where you're looking sounds really invasive. But let me let you in on a little secret because based on your browsing habits and how much time you spend on social networks, MENA already knows what you're looking at. Really, they already know what you're interested in. Um, they already know what you're not interested in based upon your behaviors. Like that kind of data can be analyzed and they know how to target you specifically. The browsing data and habits give pretty much all the information needed, so the eye tracking thing just becomes a more overt way of doing that and provides a more precise way of implementing ads. But let me tell you the creepy surveillance stuff that's already out there that exists. That is the Facebook of today, and you don't need eye tracking software too or hardware to make that happen. Happy Thursday, y'all. On Monday this week, hackers compromised a cryptocurrency trading platform called crypto dot com and they were able to make off with around thirty four million dollars worth of cryptocurrency. That is a heck of a bank heist. The company recently copped to the hack in a blog post, and it had halted withdrawals for about fourteen hours for all users and send on a message that essentially said, hey, y'all, it's tot's okay. Your money is safe. But for four three customers that wasn't really the case, at least not temporarily, because it was their accounts that got hit and the hackers were able to drain some of those accounts. Crypto dot Com forced all users to reset their two factor authentication methods so that they can access to their accounts. I've talked about two factor authentication lots of times in the past for those who are not really familiar with what that means. It means you need you need two different ways of authenticating who you are in order to access something, and it falls into different buckets. And typically we think of those buckets as being something you possess, like say your phone, uh, something you know like a password, and something you are like biometric data that's related to some unique physical feature that you have, and that you need to provide one from one of those from at least two categories for to be able to access whatever it is. So commonly this is something where it's like your password and then you get a text message on your phone with like a six digit key, and it's only when you provide both of those pieces of information that you can gain access to your account. To factor authentication or multi factor authentication is very smart. You want to use it, if it's available, you want it turned on. I know it can be a half soul, but it is superior to just relying on a single factor. However, as interesting as it is that you know crypto dot Com told all its users you need to reset your two factor authentication. It appears that the hackers were able to access those four three accounts without using two factor authentication in the first place. So I don't know all the details about the hack, but if that's the case, if the hackers were getting access to stuff and they weren't having to use two factor authentication, that's kind of like saying, hey, you know, I know your house was robbed the other night, so we've replaced all the locks on your front door, and it turns out that the thieves came in through the window. Like, Okay, well, I'm glad the door is more secure. But if that's not how the the information or in this case, the money was accessed, then that's not really a solution. However, to the company's credit, it did cover the losses experienced by each of those four accounts. It restored the money in whatever cryptocurrency form it was in to all FOE accounts, presumably under crypto dot COM's own expense, and the hackers are reportedly in the middle of using various crypto apps to launder the money they've stolen. What a world. Okay, we're gonna take another quick break when we come back we're gonna have a butt load of Google news as well some other stuff. Okay, time to transition into the Google heavy portion of the news for today. First up, Alphabet CEO Sandar Pichai, along with Apple CEO Tim Cook have reportedly been making the rounds with lawmakers in the US, arranging private phone calls to talk with senators about stuff. And you might wonder why, Well, it's because of a piece of proposed legislation called the American Innovation and Choice Online Act that could potentially really shake things up for some big tech companies like Apple and Google and Amazon. Part of that act focuses on the practice of a company promoting its own products over competitors in the company's various marketplaces. So let's stick with Google. So this would mean that Google would not be allowed to give its own products and services a promotional advantage in Google ads on Google platforms like Search. Apple wouldn't be able to do the same thing with Apple products and services on Apple platforms, And of course Amazon has been dingd for this multiple times, with the company being accused of promoting its own products over that of competitors on the Amazon marketplace. So if this legislation were to pass, that would be a huge threat to the current business models that these big tech companies rely upon. It's one of the big ways these companies become so gargantuan in the first place, and competitors say the practice is you know, completely unfair, and even if the competitor were to offer a superior product at a superior price, they are at a promotional disadvantage. Whether the tech CEOs are making headway with the senators, that's hard to say. I mean, money talks, especially in politics, So it's entirely possible that you know, these CEOs are persuading enough lawmakers to oppose or amend the legislation to the point that it doesn't really do anything um And of course, again this is proposed legislation. It's not like it's been voted on yet. But there's definitely a growing resentment toward big tech from multiple sectors, including the common populace, and it has been growing for some time now. So there might be some pressure from constituents for some of these senators to kind of stick to their guns and pass the legislation. We'll have to wait and see if that comes to pass. In other Google news, the company is reportedly establishing a new business unit. This one focuses on blockchain and distributed computing and data storage technologies like future ones. And this is according to Bloomberg, which published that the the outlet had received a leaked email from within the company revealing the fact that they have established this blockchain business unit. Now, does this mean that Google is going to launch its own cryptocurrency in the future, or that maybe, you know, Android users or Chrome users are going to be flooded with ads for Google and f t s. I don't know. I hope not, but I can't say for certain. But it is at least an early indicator that Google is experimenting with more technologies associated with stuff like the concept of Web three and the metaverse. Google has already obviously been working with virtual reality and augmented reality applications. I mean, Google Glass was a very early a R commercial product, had a very limited commercial run, but it was something like that. So Google certainly has been dipping its toe in various disciplines that are converging towards this metaverse concept. And I'm thinking this might be just sort of a way for Google to stay involved in the game. I don't see Google as a company that's going to lead the way in that space. But I also see it as a company that doesn't want to find itself completely left out. Google has a dominant position, some might call it a monopolistic position when it comes to certain things like like search and ad revenue or add ad services um and I'm sure the company is thinking, well, we want to future proof that. We don't want to make sure. We want to make sure that the next stage of the Web, whatever it may be, doesn't cut us out of it. So that's what I see this as. I don't see it necessarily as an indication that we're going to, you know, see a Google version of crypto anytime soon, although that could happen, I just I'm not seeing it right now. And for a long time, Google has offered a service in its g Suite product that gives you the chance to create a custom domain built on top of Google, and that gives you a lot of different options, including you can have a Gmail address that isn't a Gmail address, I mean it is Gmail, but the domain like it could be a custom one. Like I could have a Gmail address that has the domain Jonathan Strickland is awesome dot com instead of Gmail dot com. Not that I have an account with that domain, but I could if I wanted to, and if it were available anyway. From the moment the Google offered that service up through two thousand and twelve, there was a free basic version of the product, so you could enroll, you could get that custom domain. You didn't have to spend any money, and it was the bare bones version, but it existed, and uh, if you ponied up the cash, then you could get access to other extra features. Yeah, that basic service was free of charge. But then in two thousand twelve, Google stopped offering it for free, but it also allowed those who had established a free account to keep using it. Now, a decade later, the company has made the decision to come to each one of those users who still has an established free account and have for years, and now Google is going to say you must pay tribute. We will burn your domain to the ground and so salt into the earth. Okay, not not that, but it's the gist of what they're saying. So for the folks who did get in early, while those free days are coming to an end, and then they will have to either pay or they will see their accounts suspended starting on May first. Anyone with a free account but who has billing information attached to their Google account will then be upgraded quote unquote to the paid service automatically, which is fun times and starting in July, those accounts will start to get billed every month for continued use of the service. If an account does not have billing information attached to it, and if the user hasn't you know, updated their account to have billing infoe attached by July one, their account will be suspended. This is a pretty tough pill to swallow. To have a free service suddenly switch up on you like that. That's never fun. On a slightly more fun note, Google has launched a beta program in South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and people in those regions can get beta access to a Google Play Games app on Windows eleven. Google had previously committed to bringing Android games to Windows eleven back in December, and when does eleven includes an Android app layer that's supposed to make this seamless. There's been some use of Google apps onto Windows platforms in the past, but this is supposed to make it really work. Uh. At first, I was like, this doesn't interest me, And then I thought, hum, if I have some Windows eleven machines, that means I could play Marvel Puzzle Quest on a PC and have my progress SYNCD across all devices. And I started to come around to it because that's actually the only Android game I currently have installed on my phone. And I know I people will tell me that's not even a good one. I don't care. I play it pretty much every day. Um Google has said it will expand this to other regions throughout two but it has yet to release a timeline for that rollout. Amazon is continuing to build on its presence in the brick and mortar world. The company had already opened up a few of its famous grocery stores, as well as purchased the Whole Foods chain, and I had a couple of brick and mortar bookstores. Now. Amazon has announced that it will open a clothing store in Glendale, California, later this year called Amazon Style, and the store will cover clothing from a number of different designers at different price points, everything from budget to high level designers, and the company says that the stores will incorporate technology on a pretty fundamental level and customers will interact with that technology using their smartphones. So Amazon says it will reserve floor space to display items, so there won't be any racks of clothes there. Instead, you'll see an example of an outfit and uh way to scan that outfit presumably, so use your phone, you scan the outfit, and then you can use the app to select you know, the size you want, the color you want, the style you want of whatever it is, and have it sent to a fitting room or even to a pickup counter um anyway, then you could go to the fitting room and try on the items. And in the fitting rooms they're gonna have touch screens where let's say you get in there and you try something on, like I don't know, you want to get those pleather chaps you see on the show floor, and you have some sent to the fing room, and you go back there and you say, yeah, these are just a little too loose. They don't give them took us the own f I was hoping for, And you could use the touch screen to request a smaller size of pleather chaps to be sent to the fitting room, so you can really get that lift that you wanted. You might wonder why I picked pleather chaps so back in Oh, I don't know, more than twenty years ago, I was in a play where I had to wear pleather chaps. So it's just one of those things pops up in your head every now and then. Anyway, Uh. Amazon also plans to use its palm scanning technology that's used in other stores to link customer accounts to specific customers, so you could, you know, pick out the stuff that you want to go to the pickup counter, scan your palm, and you would automatically have the price of your purchases deducted from your account. Now, as someone who hates to shop for clothing at all, none of this appeals to me, but I could easily imagine it being excited to folks who aren't, you know, a grumpy chaps like myself. Twitch, another Amazon property, published an open letter from the company's Vice president of Global Trust and Safety, Angela Hessian, to lay out how the platform has recently been tackling issues of abuse on Twitch, and one of the measures was that Twitch deleted millions of automated butts in order to curtail what are called hate raids. Now, if you're not familiar with Twitch, you might not be aware of raids in general. Twitch is a live streaming platform mainly geared towards video games, but there are other types of content on Twitch as well, and raids don't necessarily have to be negative. In fact, a raid can be really uplifting and awesome. So essentially, a raid is when someone directs their audience to another streamer. So you might have like popular streamers who have thousands and thousands of people watching at a time, and sometimes they like to do this to give kind of like a crazy short term boost to lesser known or sometimes outright obscure streamers who are on the platform. So you could have someone who's really influential on Twitch come across a person that they like, but that person has very few viewers of their own, and then the popular person will say, hey, let's go show them some love and open up a link to that other, you know person's stream and send floods of enthusiastic fans to go and you know, show some love. Well. I hate raid is obviously a much nastier beast as the name implies. This is when a streamer gets hit with a flood of abusive accounts hurling awful trash and chat and generally just being terrible people. And of course the you know, the people who are disproportionately the target of these kinds of attacks tend to be, you know, people of color, or people who are in the l g B t Q plus community, or women, those tend to be the most frequent targets of this kind of abuse. So Twitch has deleted millions of bots that were essentially programmed to just spread misery and abuse, which I think is definitely a step in the right direction. Now, it's upsetting that anyone would go to the trouble to set a bot loose with this kind of intent in the first place. But those are much deeper social problems that I don't expect a company like Twitch to solve because it can't. But seeing Twitch try to mitigate the you know, implementation of that problem is a good thing. Not that the problem is going to go away or even necessarily get better. People who are determined to be hateful and nasty and harmful will always find ways to do that. Now, hopefully Twitch can make that hard enough and frustrating enough that most evil trolls out there won't stick it out to see it through. Uh, I mean, come on, there are better things for you to do with your time than try to torture someone else. And finally, in news that for me falls into the I'll believe it when I see it category, the young Company Space Entertainment Enterprise or c s E has announced plans that will build and operate a space station module that will include a content studio as well as a sports arena by December of twenty four. Now SEE is the company that's working with Tom Cruise on an upcoming space movie with scenes that will actually be shot in space, because apparently that will add authenticity to something, and and apparently Tom Cruise won't be satisfied with, you know, the crazy stuff he's done in order to make a movie in the past. He has to top it every time, so instead of hanging outside an airplane, he has to go into space. Anyway, this is all going to be part of axioms space station modules. Those, in turn will be connected to the International Space Station on a temporary basis. Axiom secured permission from NASA back in to build out modules for the I s S that will have a private commercial purpose, and the eventual plan is that the Axiom modules will detach from the International Space station, and then Axiom will have its own space station, its own independence station down the line when it's time to sunset the old International Space Station, which is well pasted its expiration date its original expiration date anyway for some of the modules. But you know, it's been an operation for quite some time and expected to continue for the next few years at least. Now. Maybe I'm being way too pessimistic here. It's entirely possible that we will see this module dedicated to content creation and uh space sports by the end of I don't know what kind of space sports. I do know they will definitely be the kind I'll never be able to do, for lots of reasons, among which are my lack of athletic ability and my suspicion that going up there would cost more than I will ever make in my lifetime. More fun times, but it is kind of cool. And you know what, it's Axiom that's actually building out this module, which I think is going to be called C one. And because axioms already in the process of building out modules, and these are inflatable modules as well, um they they use air to hold a firm shape in space. Because of that, it's it's actually not maybe that far fetched to think that it will be ready by It just seems like an incredibly aggressive plan. But then these plans could have been in the works for ages and we're just now being let in on it. Um. I just whenever anything involves space, I automatically think any deadline you hear is more of a suggestion. Other evidence to point to that the James Webb Space Telescope, which was supposed to launch like more than twenty years ago, I think, And finally did um always good to put an asterisk next to those dates. That's it for the news for Thursday, January two. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover on tech Stuff, feel free to reach out to be on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon Y. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.