Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Okay, hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcast. Send How the tech are you? It's time for the tech news for the week ending on March twenty second, twenty twenty four. And last week I dedicated an entire episode to how the US House of Representatives voted in favor of a bill to force TikTok's parent company, Byte Dance to either sell TikTok off or face a national band for the app. And I've got a couple of follow ups on that story. And to be clear, that particular bill still has to pass in the US Senate, which isn't a guarantee. In fact, it's not even a guarantee that the bill will come up for a vote in the Senate before it could be signed into law, so it's not a done deal. So first up, in that episode, I heavily criticized the US government for being far too myopic and focusing just on TikTok instead of looking at the larger picture in which data brokers collect and sell information from a host of different services and devices. And platforms. I argued that TikTok doesn't need to have a parent company that merits the quote unquote foreign adversary label in order for it to be a threat or a concern. I guess some folks in the House were thinking of the same thing, because this week the House of Representatives voted to pass a bill called the Protecting Americans Data from Foreign Adversaries Act. So this bill would make it against the law for data brokers to sell American citizen data to foreign adversaries such as China, Russia, or North Korea or entities that work within those countries. So it wouldn't matter where this information came from, whether it came from TikTok or Facebook or Google or Apple or any other entity that regularly trades and the zeros and ones that relate to American citizens information. If this has passed into law, the Federal Trade Commission or FTC, will be able to penalize data brokers that are found to have violated the law. And I think this is a modest improvement. It removes that laser focus from really a single company, that being TikTok. However, all that being said, it's still a pretty modest bump. Personally, I don't think foreign adversaries are really the only entities that we should be concerned about when it comes to protecting our privacy and personal information. I think domestic companies can be just as dangerous, like Meta or Google. That being said, the Verge reports that lawmakers behind this most recent act are hopeful that the recent ground swell of support that these measures have had, at least in the House of Representatives, could build momentum to a more comprehensive privacy protection set of laws down the road here in the United States, which you know, I sure hope that that's the case, because it's long overdue. Meanwhile, over at Gizmoto, Thomas Jermaine has a piece titled politicians who voted to ban TikTok may own as much as one hundred and twenty six million dollars in tech stocks. So Germaine points out that the stock ownership could indicate a conflict of interest with regard to the TikTok. Brewjaha that the companies that some of these politicians have heavily invested in are ones that potentially could benefit if something were to you, though happened to TikTok sure would be a shame. Could be that these politicians are not even entirely motivated out of concern for protecting US citizens, as hard as that is to believe, they might not be acting in our best interests, and instead maybe they're hopeful that by slapping a Chinese owned company around, they could see their own stock portfolio flourish. I don't know if that's the case, but I will say that once again, at the end of the day, it really doesn't even matter what the truth is, because as long as there is a perception that someone is acting more out of their own self interest rather than a genuine desire to be a leader and to protect their constituents, well that's enough to undermine confidence in that person. In fact, Jermaine's piece and Gizmoto really explores that issue thoroughly. I recommend checking it out. It's a well written piece and it quotes a lot of different people who are saying I'm not saying that these politicians are trying to engage in some form of insider trading. What I'm saying is this isn't a good look, and unfortunately it does end up hurting confidence in those leaders. And why they are doing what they're doing, and they need to address that. Now, let us turn our attention to the US government targeting another big tech company, this one firmly rooted in America itself. I'm talking about Apple. The US Department of Justice has brought a lawsuit against Apple, alleging that the company has made a monopoly out of the Apple iPhone ecosystem, and that the company had leveraged its near total control over that ecosystem to drive corporate valuation at the expense of pretty much anyone who wasn't directly an Apple stakeholder, including folks like customers and developers, and from a very high level, I don't think you can really argue against that. It's pretty blatantly clear that Apple has done that. They have nearly always been a buttoned down company that practiced jealous control over all aspects of its technological ecosystem. Now I say nearly always, because there was a period of time when Steve Jobs had been banished from Apple where things were a bit different, but upon his return, they kind of came back to it. This particular lawsuit cites a myriad of Apple decisions that support the legal accusation of the company being anti competitive, including the infamous Apple Messages issue. So the difference between those green and blue bubbles and Apple Messages is one of many choices that the Department of Justice says exists solely to pressure customers into buying into and then staying within, the Apple iPhone world. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. The DOJ says that Apple has also purposefully limited interoperability with technologies from other companies like smart watches or digital wallets, which discourages iPhone owners from branching outside the Apple world and kind of corrals them into buying and using more Apple products. Now, I've said that for years that Apple's very good at building stuff that works great with other Apple stuff, but not so great with working with other technologies. The iPod is a great example. Early on, if you didn't have a Macintosh computer, there was no reason to get an iPod because it wasn't compatible with other types of computers. And even when it was compatible, say like the Windows version of iTunes, was so bloated and clunky that it would discourage you from using it like it was almost it almost felt like Apple was intentionally trying to drive people to a band and whatever other technologies they used in favor of Apple technologies, because then everything worked really well. And so what the DOJ is saying is that the company has continued to do that, and it's doing it specifically in order to decrease competition in the space. Now, there's a lot more to the lawsuit than what I've already said, and I am no legal expert, but on a surface level, it's actually really hard for me to find much fault in the argument. Now, that does not mean that it's going to stand up in court. It might not, and Apple says it vehemently disagrees with the premise of the lawsuit, that in fact, that this constitutes a monopoly in the first place, and that the company is going to fight the lawsuit. Of course, the fact that Apple recently had to comply with EU regulations that deal with similar issues could mean that Apple is already on its back foot on this matter. Now, I do have another Apple related story I wanted to mention before we move on with other news. Technica's Dan Gooden has a piece titled Unpatchable Vulnerability in Apple chip leaks secret encryption keys, and as I'm sure you can imagine, that is not a good thing. The chips in question are Apple's M series of processors. I highly recommend reading the piece if you want all the technical details that the piece does go into great technical detail, which I'm not going to do for this news episode. But the challenge of fixing this problem is that the vulnerability is actually built into the architecture of the chips themselves, as in the physical layout of the chips design. So that kind of thing is not easy to fix. You know, you can't just take the chip in to get an alteration. You would either need to swap the chip out for a different one with a completely different architecture, and that would still need to be able to work with whatever device in question you're switching out of. Right, Like, a different architecture doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be compatible with the computer you're using. Or you know, you have to wait for a new generation of devices that have a brand new chip in them that don't does and include the flaw, Or you've got to find some way to patch the issue and try and work around it, and likely any patch you create would really impact chip performance because the chip would have to find a way to work that is counter to the way the chip had been designed to work, so there are no great solutions to this kind of a problem, and the vulnerability could mean that malicious hackers could steal cryptographic keys from Macintosh computers under the right circumstances, which is not cool. But again, you should check out the article in Ours Technica to get all the technical details. Okay, we've got more news to go through before we get to that, Let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. We're back, so I've got more government versus tech stories to cover. A Senator Elizabeth Warren is calling on the Securities in Exchange Commission or SEC in the US to investigate Elon Musk and Tesla. This would not be the first rodeo between the SEC and Tesla if this investigation does in fact launch. There have been a few tussles between Musk and the SEC in the past, as Musk has shown quite a few times that apparently he sees rules as being something that happened to other people. Anyway, what is the reasoning behind this current push for an investigation. Well, Warren says she is concerned there could be a quote possible misappropriation of Tesla resources and conflicts of interest arising from mister Musk's dual role at Tesla and X renamed from Twitter end quote. This is something that some Tesla shareholders have been arguing for some time, so at the very least, they have said that Musk dividing his attention between his electric vehicle car company that has been down a pretty bumpy road for a couple of years now and a trash fire of a social media platform isn't really in the best interest for Tesla shareholders. I mean, this was the reason why Musk named an new CEO for X, even though Musk has not really stepped away from X all that much. So. Warren alleges that the board of directors over at Tesla is essentially stocked with Musks, buddies and cronies, that it's it's a Musk controlled board of directors, and that this is good for Elon Musk, but it's not good for shareholders or for the company itself. One might argue that Musk's compensation package serves as evidence that this accusation has some merit to it. Warren also cites Elon Musk himself, who has stated on X and elsewhere that his desire to gain twenty five percent voting power at TESLA is a very real concern of his, and that if he doesn't get what he wants, he's gonna make them sorry. Not in so many words, but you know that's the gist of it. Musk has responded in his own typical way by lobbying criticisms and accusations and insults through his ex platform. So will we see the SEC go after Musk yet again? And if so, will the SEC again slap Musk with more penalties? I would say probably, But that's largely because Musk makes it really hard to not go after him. He just seems intent on escalating situations. All right, But how about some positive news related to one of Musk's endeavors for real, I'm not being facetious here. Nolan Arba is the first human recipient of a Neurlink brain computer interface system. So Neurlink is one of Elon Musk's companies, and Arba is a quadriplegic who opted into the surgery to have a Neurlink interface implant, and he reports that he can now control a cursor on a computer screen just by imagining the cursor moving around and He's actually likened it to being akin to using the Force in a Star Wars movie. It's given him the ability to play Civilization six, which is a turn based strategy game in one of his favorite video games, and I think that's pretty awesome. So our Ba says that the technology hasn't been flawless, it's not without its issues, but that he's been given a ton more agency than he experienced in the past. And I think any technology that increases accessibility and gives folks more autonomy is something that we should really be proud of, and I think it's super cool. We also have to remember that there still are concerns about Neuralink, including ethical concerns about how the company has experimented on animals in the process of developing this technology, and that perhaps it hasn't done so responsibly, so we can't ignore that. But I do think it's important that you know, I acknowledge the stuff that is legitimately really cool, and I think giving folks the ability to have computer access even if they don't have command of their limbs, I think that's really awesome. Back to various US government agencies that are trying to hold tech companies to task. So next up, I want to talk about the Federal Communications Commission, or FCC, as well as the cable industry. So I'm largely drawing from an article written by John Broadkin for Ours Technica. It's titled FCC bans cable TV industry favorite trick for hiding full cost of service, So you might remember this has been an ongoing issue. The FCC has argued that cable companies regularly hide tons of fees in monthly bills, so that the amount you have to pay is significantly higher than the amount the cable companies advertise. So the company might say, like, this is just a hypothetical example that perhaps monthly service would cost forty nine dollars, But this is before all these odd fees start to pop up, and it balloons that figure to much higher levels every billing cycle. So now the FCC has mandated that cable companies include the all in price while they advertise services. The cable company can't cite some stripped down version only to pull the old switch ru when it's time to actually build customers. Instead, they have to say what the full cost is going to be instead of saying, oh sorry that yeah, that was without the broadcast TV fee included, you know, or whatever. Cable companies are ticked off. No big surprise there. Broadcod quotes a lobby group for the industry that says, quote, micro management of advertising in today's hyper competitive marketplace will force operators to either clutter their ads with confusing disclosures or leave pricing information out entirely end quote. And I just want to say, all right, First of all, what do you mean by hyper competitive marketplace? That is laughable? In the United States. There are tons of households in the US that have little to no choice in providers when it comes to things like terrestrial television service. So where is this competition you're talking about unless you're talking about competing with other forms like streaming services. And yes, cable TV is dying out, but it's because largely of the predatory practices and terrible service associated with cable companies. Anyway, these new rules won't take effect for several more months, and there are a lot more processes that are to follow, so you can easily imagine the cable industry is likely to contest this and the FCC's authority to even pass this in the first place. So fun times. But I recommend the article in Ours Technica if you want to know more of than details. Alexandra Alper of Reuter's reported on the United Nations adopting a global resolution that focuses on artificial intelligence and how countries must commit to protecting human rights while making sure AI doesn't, you know, go all terminator on US done those exact words, mind you. So the US is actually the country that proposed this resolution, China co sponsored it, and those are you know, the two leading superpowers advancing AI technology in the world today. And you know, we've seen numerous times in the recent past that the way AI has been advanced hasn't always been in the most peaceful or non disruptive ways. So this resolution has passed, but it's also a non binding resolution. So you could make an argument, and I certainly do that there is a lot of circumstance going on here, but nothing really of substance. It's kind of like leaders saying, yes, these are things that we should definitely be concerned about, and then that's the extent of it, and everything just keeps on going the way it's been going, which is kind of frustrating. If you ask me, I guess once we're all reduced to hiding out in bunkers as the robots rampage overhead. We can scold the various world leaders for not actually doing anything substantial about safeguarding against risks associated with AI, but just you know, saying we probably should. It's just a man politics. I get it why everyone hates when I bring it up. It's unfortunate. I don't want to either. It's just the world we live in. So John Ray, the guy who was brought in to help dismantle the bankrupted cryptocurrency company FTX, y'all remember that one, right, Jenrey was brought in in order to return as much value as he could to investors and former customers of this cryptocurrency exchange, and he has now weighed in on Sam Bankman Freed's current fate. So Freed, or SBF as he was known in the crypto community, is coming up for sentencing soon. He was found guilty on multiple charges of fraud earlier, and now he faces up to a maximum of one hundred and ten years in prison, though it could be significantly fewer than that. It could be like five years if the judge decides, and SBF essentially has previously argued for clemency. He wrote letters that stay at his crimes resulted in essentially no losses or harmed to customers and investors, et cetera. So John Ray wrote in to say, oh, contrere monfrere Yeah. He says that stakeholders have filed claims that collectively amount to twenty three point six quintillion dollars, that is beyond a princely sum. The actual estimated loss is somewhere around ten billion dollars, still an astronomical amount of money, but not in the quintillion range, So there's some discrepancy here. And Ray says that like in order to address each claim, there is a significant amount of work that goes into it. So clearly there is a real cost associated with SBF's crimes here. And Ray does not mince words in his letter. He says that while his team has worked very hard to get as much back as possible, it did so while SBF was casting aspersions on their efforts. And moreover, there are plenty of cases where there's just no way to reclaim what had been lost, including quote, the bribes to Chinese officials or the hundreds of millions of dollars he meaning SBF spent to buy access to or time with celebrities or politicians or investments for which he grossly overpaid having done zero diligence. The harm was vast, the remorse is nonexistent. End quote yaoza. That is spilling the ding dang darn tea, y'all. But beyond on that, Ray also outlined five times he says SBF lied in an effort to ask for a lighter sentence. So John Ray is essentially saying, throw the book at this guy. That the crimes that SBF committed and his continued quest to shift blame to other people show that he doesn't deserve a lighter sentence, So we'll have to see what actually gets handed down. Prosecutors are calling for a pretty hefty sentence of around like forty or fifty years, so I'm not feeling too optimistic for SBF's chances of getting out with a light one in this particular case. I think the judge might be a little more inclined to lean a bit heavier in this particular example. Okay, I've got some more news stories to get through before we get to that. Let's take another quick break, all right, Now we've got a couple of hacking stories that we should cover, So first up, some researchers at Colorado State University uncovered vulnerabilities in electronic logging devices or elds that are used by the trucking industry. So the purpose of an ELD is to keep track of stuff like the number of miles and hours driven for a run of vehicle performance and stuff like that. Right, it's to be part of fleet maintenance and oversight for things like drivers and individual vehicles. But the researchers found that at least one type of ELD and there's only a few that are used by the whole industry. These elds are components that are part of larger systems, and while there are a ton of these systems that are in use in the trucking industry, there are only, you know, a few elds that are produced. So at least one, maybe more of these elds has a severe vulnerability that can be compromised via Bluetooth or Wi Fi. And it's even possible to do a compromising attack on one of these elds if you're just driving relatively close to a truck that's in motion that has a system that has this ELD in it, and once it's compromised, the attacker can do stuff like they can send a signal that would force a truck driver to pull off the road. They can even infect the truck so that it in turn will infect other trucks if they come within driving range. And it's like turning a truck into patient zero for a pandemic, only it's a computer virus rather than a biological one. And obviously this vulnerability could lead to a situation where an entire fleet could become compromised and then manipulated. It's a huge danger to not only drivers on the road, but also supply chains in general. So, according to the researchers, the manufacturer behind the particular ELD they have tested, they didn't reveal which one it was. They said that company is working on a firmware update that could address this problem. But the researchers say other elds might have similar vulnerabilities, and that all manufacturers should be investigating this so that they can avoid, say a series of attacks that could have a severe impact on the shipping industry in the United States. Next up are some research hackers who disclose that electronic locks from Dormacaba have a massive security flaw in them, so these locks use RFID technology. Lots of hotels use this particular brand for their door locks, and the hacker showed that using an NFC capable device like even an Android phone with NFC it's near field communication abilities, you can clone hotel key cards and use the cloned card to then access a room like you can make a master key this way. All you really need is an actual key card that was compatible with these systems and an NFC enabled device to send a signal to overwrite the information on that key card. You know, these cards are meant to be wiped and then re used, right, so if you can do that and you overwrite the info onto the key card, then you can create essentially a skeleton key that'll work on these locks. That includes being able to open dead bolts, because while you can't close a dead bolt on your hotel room door, typically these dead bolts are also connected to electronic systems, so that housekeeping, for example, can open the door even if you've closed the dead bolts. So really the only thing you're left with that can keep your door locked would be something like if it has a chain on it, or something similar along those lines. You know, something that you manually use to secure the door, and even then you know it's just another level of protection. It's not meant to keep everyone out forever. So researchers had already worked with Dormacaba and told them about this vulnerability, and the company has done an impressive amount of work to replace more than a third of the locks that were out there in the world that are vulnerable to this. But that means you still have around two thirds of the locks that are still vulnerable, and it could take years to replace most of those because apparently it's not just replacing the locks, it's updating the entire system so that that includes key cards and the encoders and everything like that. The researchers say that as far as they can tell, the exploit is not currently active in the wild, so that's something at least. But yeah, if you're going to be staying in a hotel, just you know, keep that in mind. You might want to make use of that safe in that hotel room if you can. Now, let's end with some fun news. There's a rumor circulating that Sony is preparing an upgraded PS five to launch in time for this year's holiday season. So this comes as Sony has said that the PS five is kind of entering the latter half of its life cycle, which is pretty wild to me. I still don't own a PS five or an Xbox Series X for that matter. The rumored PS five Pro should be able to deliver upscaled graphics and provide better performance and frame rates, but there's no confirmation on this story yet, so there's also no firm details to give about this console's stats or how much it's gonna cost. My guess is it'll be fairly expensive because Sony has stated that it plans to focus on profit for the last half of the PS five's life cycle. So it sounds to me like Sony's goal is not just to entice folks like me who never adopted the current generation of consoles, but to also convince people who already own a PS five to upgrade to the new model now. I think to do that, they're gonna have to really firmly demonstrate why this new PS five is going to be desirable. I don't think a boost in graphics or performance is going to be enough, like to say, like existing titles will run better and look better on this. I don't think that's gonna be quite enough to convince a lot of folks to upgrade. They're gonna need to have a decent library of launch title games that really demonstrate the value of the PS five pro if in fact this is their plan, because without those titles, there's not much of a sales pitch there unless it's for someone like me who just never got on one of the PS fives in the first place. And if I'm going to buy one, I'm more likely to go for, you know, the best version that's out there, rather than buy something that's been said to be on the end of its life cycle. And Sony is not the only company that's planning new hardware launches. Microsoft had a leak, a document leak that showed that a code name device called Brooklyn is a future Xbox hardware. It's like cylindrical in shape, which is interesting. And Nintendo reportedly is preparing to launch a follow up to the highly successful Switch handheld consoles, so should be looking at some new video game hardware in the not too distant future. Finally, I have a recommended article for y'all. It's from Time dot Com. It's by Will Henshall and it's titled Nobody Knows How to safety test AI, which you know, it's a bit of a problem. We all we recognize that AI can pose potential threats. That's clear that those threats range in severity from worrying about something that could cost a company millions of dollars or potentially replace people so that folks are out of a job, or all the way up to like AI powered weaponized systems that could potentially misidentify targets. I mean, there's pretty terrifying ways that AI could potentially harm us. But it's also hard to figure out how do we test for that, How do we discover how AI could potentially cause problems before we deploy that AI in the real world and just find out through experience that is an issue. So I recommend checking out that article if you're interested in learning more about that. That's it for this week's news. I hope all of you out there are well, and I will talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Okay, hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcast. Send How the tech are you? It's time for the tech news for the week ending on March twenty second, twenty twenty four. And last week I dedicated an entire episode to how the US House of Representatives voted in favor of a bill to force TikTok's parent company, Byte Dance to either sell TikTok off or face a national band for the app. And I've got a couple of follow ups on that story. And to be clear, that particular bill still has to pass in the US Senate, which isn't a guarantee. In fact, it's not even a guarantee that the bill will come up for a vote in the Senate before it could be signed into law, so it's not a done deal. So first up, in that episode, I heavily criticized the US government for being far too myopic and focusing just on TikTok instead of looking at the larger picture in which data brokers collect and sell information from a host of different services and devices. And platforms. I argued that TikTok doesn't need to have a parent company that merits the quote unquote foreign adversary label in order for it to be a threat or a concern. I guess some folks in the House were thinking of the same thing, because this week the House of Representatives voted to pass a bill called the Protecting Americans Data from Foreign Adversaries Act. So this bill would make it against the law for data brokers to sell American citizen data to foreign adversaries such as China, Russia, or North Korea or entities that work within those countries. So it wouldn't matter where this information came from, whether it came from TikTok or Facebook or Google or Apple or any other entity that regularly trades and the zeros and ones that relate to American citizens information. If this has passed into law, the Federal Trade Commission or FTC, will be able to penalize data brokers that are found to have violated the law. And I think this is a modest improvement. It removes that laser focus from really a single company, that being TikTok. However, all that being said, it's still a pretty modest bump. Personally, I don't think foreign adversaries are really the only entities that we should be concerned about when it comes to protecting our privacy and personal information. I think domestic companies can be just as dangerous, like Meta or Google. That being said, the Verge reports that lawmakers behind this most recent act are hopeful that the recent ground swell of support that these measures have had, at least in the House of Representatives, could build momentum to a more comprehensive privacy protection set of laws down the road here in the United States, which you know, I sure hope that that's the case, because it's long overdue. Meanwhile, over at Gizmoto, Thomas Jermaine has a piece titled politicians who voted to ban TikTok may own as much as one hundred and twenty six million dollars in tech stocks. So Germaine points out that the stock ownership could indicate a conflict of interest with regard to the TikTok. Brewjaha that the companies that some of these politicians have heavily invested in are ones that potentially could benefit if something were to you, though happened to TikTok sure would be a shame. Could be that these politicians are not even entirely motivated out of concern for protecting US citizens, as hard as that is to believe, they might not be acting in our best interests, and instead maybe they're hopeful that by slapping a Chinese owned company around, they could see their own stock portfolio flourish. I don't know if that's the case, but I will say that once again, at the end of the day, it really doesn't even matter what the truth is, because as long as there is a perception that someone is acting more out of their own self interest rather than a genuine desire to be a leader and to protect their constituents, well that's enough to undermine confidence in that person. In fact, Jermaine's piece and Gizmoto really explores that issue thoroughly. I recommend checking it out. It's a well written piece and it quotes a lot of different people who are saying I'm not saying that these politicians are trying to engage in some form of insider trading. What I'm saying is this isn't a good look, and unfortunately it does end up hurting confidence in those leaders. And why they are doing what they're doing, and they need to address that. Now, let us turn our attention to the US government targeting another big tech company, this one firmly rooted in America itself. I'm talking about Apple. The US Department of Justice has brought a lawsuit against Apple, alleging that the company has made a monopoly out of the Apple iPhone ecosystem, and that the company had leveraged its near total control over that ecosystem to drive corporate valuation at the expense of pretty much anyone who wasn't directly an Apple stakeholder, including folks like customers and developers, and from a very high level, I don't think you can really argue against that. It's pretty blatantly clear that Apple has done that. They have nearly always been a buttoned down company that practiced jealous control over all aspects of its technological ecosystem. Now I say nearly always, because there was a period of time when Steve Jobs had been banished from Apple where things were a bit different, but upon his return, they kind of came back to it. This particular lawsuit cites a myriad of Apple decisions that support the legal accusation of the company being anti competitive, including the infamous Apple Messages issue. So the difference between those green and blue bubbles and Apple Messages is one of many choices that the Department of Justice says exists solely to pressure customers into buying into and then staying within, the Apple iPhone world. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. The DOJ says that Apple has also purposefully limited interoperability with technologies from other companies like smart watches or digital wallets, which discourages iPhone owners from branching outside the Apple world and kind of corrals them into buying and using more Apple products. Now, I've said that for years that Apple's very good at building stuff that works great with other Apple stuff, but not so great with working with other technologies. The iPod is a great example. Early on, if you didn't have a Macintosh computer, there was no reason to get an iPod because it wasn't compatible with other types of computers. And even when it was compatible, say like the Windows version of iTunes, was so bloated and clunky that it would discourage you from using it like it was almost it almost felt like Apple was intentionally trying to drive people to a band and whatever other technologies they used in favor of Apple technologies, because then everything worked really well. And so what the DOJ is saying is that the company has continued to do that, and it's doing it specifically in order to decrease competition in the space. Now, there's a lot more to the lawsuit than what I've already said, and I am no legal expert, but on a surface level, it's actually really hard for me to find much fault in the argument. Now, that does not mean that it's going to stand up in court. It might not, and Apple says it vehemently disagrees with the premise of the lawsuit, that in fact, that this constitutes a monopoly in the first place, and that the company is going to fight the lawsuit. Of course, the fact that Apple recently had to comply with EU regulations that deal with similar issues could mean that Apple is already on its back foot on this matter. Now, I do have another Apple related story I wanted to mention before we move on with other news. Technica's Dan Gooden has a piece titled Unpatchable Vulnerability in Apple chip leaks secret encryption keys, and as I'm sure you can imagine, that is not a good thing. The chips in question are Apple's M series of processors. I highly recommend reading the piece if you want all the technical details that the piece does go into great technical detail, which I'm not going to do for this news episode. But the challenge of fixing this problem is that the vulnerability is actually built into the architecture of the chips themselves, as in the physical layout of the chips design. So that kind of thing is not easy to fix. You know, you can't just take the chip in to get an alteration. You would either need to swap the chip out for a different one with a completely different architecture, and that would still need to be able to work with whatever device in question you're switching out of. Right, Like, a different architecture doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be compatible with the computer you're using. Or you know, you have to wait for a new generation of devices that have a brand new chip in them that don't does and include the flaw, Or you've got to find some way to patch the issue and try and work around it, and likely any patch you create would really impact chip performance because the chip would have to find a way to work that is counter to the way the chip had been designed to work, so there are no great solutions to this kind of a problem, and the vulnerability could mean that malicious hackers could steal cryptographic keys from Macintosh computers under the right circumstances, which is not cool. But again, you should check out the article in Ours Technica to get all the technical details. Okay, we've got more news to go through before we get to that, Let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. We're back, so I've got more government versus tech stories to cover. A Senator Elizabeth Warren is calling on the Securities in Exchange Commission or SEC in the US to investigate Elon Musk and Tesla. This would not be the first rodeo between the SEC and Tesla if this investigation does in fact launch. There have been a few tussles between Musk and the SEC in the past, as Musk has shown quite a few times that apparently he sees rules as being something that happened to other people. Anyway, what is the reasoning behind this current push for an investigation. Well, Warren says she is concerned there could be a quote possible misappropriation of Tesla resources and conflicts of interest arising from mister Musk's dual role at Tesla and X renamed from Twitter end quote. This is something that some Tesla shareholders have been arguing for some time, so at the very least, they have said that Musk dividing his attention between his electric vehicle car company that has been down a pretty bumpy road for a couple of years now and a trash fire of a social media platform isn't really in the best interest for Tesla shareholders. I mean, this was the reason why Musk named an new CEO for X, even though Musk has not really stepped away from X all that much. So. Warren alleges that the board of directors over at Tesla is essentially stocked with Musks, buddies and cronies, that it's it's a Musk controlled board of directors, and that this is good for Elon Musk, but it's not good for shareholders or for the company itself. One might argue that Musk's compensation package serves as evidence that this accusation has some merit to it. Warren also cites Elon Musk himself, who has stated on X and elsewhere that his desire to gain twenty five percent voting power at TESLA is a very real concern of his, and that if he doesn't get what he wants, he's gonna make them sorry. Not in so many words, but you know that's the gist of it. Musk has responded in his own typical way by lobbying criticisms and accusations and insults through his ex platform. So will we see the SEC go after Musk yet again? And if so, will the SEC again slap Musk with more penalties? I would say probably, But that's largely because Musk makes it really hard to not go after him. He just seems intent on escalating situations. All right, But how about some positive news related to one of Musk's endeavors for real, I'm not being facetious here. Nolan Arba is the first human recipient of a Neurlink brain computer interface system. So Neurlink is one of Elon Musk's companies, and Arba is a quadriplegic who opted into the surgery to have a Neurlink interface implant, and he reports that he can now control a cursor on a computer screen just by imagining the cursor moving around and He's actually likened it to being akin to using the Force in a Star Wars movie. It's given him the ability to play Civilization six, which is a turn based strategy game in one of his favorite video games, and I think that's pretty awesome. So our Ba says that the technology hasn't been flawless, it's not without its issues, but that he's been given a ton more agency than he experienced in the past. And I think any technology that increases accessibility and gives folks more autonomy is something that we should really be proud of, and I think it's super cool. We also have to remember that there still are concerns about Neuralink, including ethical concerns about how the company has experimented on animals in the process of developing this technology, and that perhaps it hasn't done so responsibly, so we can't ignore that. But I do think it's important that you know, I acknowledge the stuff that is legitimately really cool, and I think giving folks the ability to have computer access even if they don't have command of their limbs, I think that's really awesome. Back to various US government agencies that are trying to hold tech companies to task. So next up, I want to talk about the Federal Communications Commission, or FCC, as well as the cable industry. So I'm largely drawing from an article written by John Broadkin for Ours Technica. It's titled FCC bans cable TV industry favorite trick for hiding full cost of service, So you might remember this has been an ongoing issue. The FCC has argued that cable companies regularly hide tons of fees in monthly bills, so that the amount you have to pay is significantly higher than the amount the cable companies advertise. So the company might say, like, this is just a hypothetical example that perhaps monthly service would cost forty nine dollars, But this is before all these odd fees start to pop up, and it balloons that figure to much higher levels every billing cycle. So now the FCC has mandated that cable companies include the all in price while they advertise services. The cable company can't cite some stripped down version only to pull the old switch ru when it's time to actually build customers. Instead, they have to say what the full cost is going to be instead of saying, oh sorry that yeah, that was without the broadcast TV fee included, you know, or whatever. Cable companies are ticked off. No big surprise there. Broadcod quotes a lobby group for the industry that says, quote, micro management of advertising in today's hyper competitive marketplace will force operators to either clutter their ads with confusing disclosures or leave pricing information out entirely end quote. And I just want to say, all right, First of all, what do you mean by hyper competitive marketplace? That is laughable? In the United States. There are tons of households in the US that have little to no choice in providers when it comes to things like terrestrial television service. So where is this competition you're talking about unless you're talking about competing with other forms like streaming services. And yes, cable TV is dying out, but it's because largely of the predatory practices and terrible service associated with cable companies. Anyway, these new rules won't take effect for several more months, and there are a lot more processes that are to follow, so you can easily imagine the cable industry is likely to contest this and the FCC's authority to even pass this in the first place. So fun times. But I recommend the article in Ours Technica if you want to know more of than details. Alexandra Alper of Reuter's reported on the United Nations adopting a global resolution that focuses on artificial intelligence and how countries must commit to protecting human rights while making sure AI doesn't, you know, go all terminator on US done those exact words, mind you. So the US is actually the country that proposed this resolution, China co sponsored it, and those are you know, the two leading superpowers advancing AI technology in the world today. And you know, we've seen numerous times in the recent past that the way AI has been advanced hasn't always been in the most peaceful or non disruptive ways. So this resolution has passed, but it's also a non binding resolution. So you could make an argument, and I certainly do that there is a lot of circumstance going on here, but nothing really of substance. It's kind of like leaders saying, yes, these are things that we should definitely be concerned about, and then that's the extent of it, and everything just keeps on going the way it's been going, which is kind of frustrating. If you ask me, I guess once we're all reduced to hiding out in bunkers as the robots rampage overhead. We can scold the various world leaders for not actually doing anything substantial about safeguarding against risks associated with AI, but just you know, saying we probably should. It's just a man politics. I get it why everyone hates when I bring it up. It's unfortunate. I don't want to either. It's just the world we live in. So John Ray, the guy who was brought in to help dismantle the bankrupted cryptocurrency company FTX, y'all remember that one, right, Jenrey was brought in in order to return as much value as he could to investors and former customers of this cryptocurrency exchange, and he has now weighed in on Sam Bankman Freed's current fate. So Freed, or SBF as he was known in the crypto community, is coming up for sentencing soon. He was found guilty on multiple charges of fraud earlier, and now he faces up to a maximum of one hundred and ten years in prison, though it could be significantly fewer than that. It could be like five years if the judge decides, and SBF essentially has previously argued for clemency. He wrote letters that stay at his crimes resulted in essentially no losses or harmed to customers and investors, et cetera. So John Ray wrote in to say, oh, contrere monfrere Yeah. He says that stakeholders have filed claims that collectively amount to twenty three point six quintillion dollars, that is beyond a princely sum. The actual estimated loss is somewhere around ten billion dollars, still an astronomical amount of money, but not in the quintillion range, So there's some discrepancy here. And Ray says that like in order to address each claim, there is a significant amount of work that goes into it. So clearly there is a real cost associated with SBF's crimes here. And Ray does not mince words in his letter. He says that while his team has worked very hard to get as much back as possible, it did so while SBF was casting aspersions on their efforts. And moreover, there are plenty of cases where there's just no way to reclaim what had been lost, including quote, the bribes to Chinese officials or the hundreds of millions of dollars he meaning SBF spent to buy access to or time with celebrities or politicians or investments for which he grossly overpaid having done zero diligence. The harm was vast, the remorse is nonexistent. End quote yaoza. That is spilling the ding dang darn tea, y'all. But beyond on that, Ray also outlined five times he says SBF lied in an effort to ask for a lighter sentence. So John Ray is essentially saying, throw the book at this guy. That the crimes that SBF committed and his continued quest to shift blame to other people show that he doesn't deserve a lighter sentence, So we'll have to see what actually gets handed down. Prosecutors are calling for a pretty hefty sentence of around like forty or fifty years, so I'm not feeling too optimistic for SBF's chances of getting out with a light one in this particular case. I think the judge might be a little more inclined to lean a bit heavier in this particular example. Okay, I've got some more news stories to get through before we get to that. Let's take another quick break, all right, Now we've got a couple of hacking stories that we should cover, So first up, some researchers at Colorado State University uncovered vulnerabilities in electronic logging devices or elds that are used by the trucking industry. So the purpose of an ELD is to keep track of stuff like the number of miles and hours driven for a run of vehicle performance and stuff like that. Right, it's to be part of fleet maintenance and oversight for things like drivers and individual vehicles. But the researchers found that at least one type of ELD and there's only a few that are used by the whole industry. These elds are components that are part of larger systems, and while there are a ton of these systems that are in use in the trucking industry, there are only, you know, a few elds that are produced. So at least one, maybe more of these elds has a severe vulnerability that can be compromised via Bluetooth or Wi Fi. And it's even possible to do a compromising attack on one of these elds if you're just driving relatively close to a truck that's in motion that has a system that has this ELD in it, and once it's compromised, the attacker can do stuff like they can send a signal that would force a truck driver to pull off the road. They can even infect the truck so that it in turn will infect other trucks if they come within driving range. And it's like turning a truck into patient zero for a pandemic, only it's a computer virus rather than a biological one. And obviously this vulnerability could lead to a situation where an entire fleet could become compromised and then manipulated. It's a huge danger to not only drivers on the road, but also supply chains in general. So, according to the researchers, the manufacturer behind the particular ELD they have tested, they didn't reveal which one it was. They said that company is working on a firmware update that could address this problem. But the researchers say other elds might have similar vulnerabilities, and that all manufacturers should be investigating this so that they can avoid, say a series of attacks that could have a severe impact on the shipping industry in the United States. Next up are some research hackers who disclose that electronic locks from Dormacaba have a massive security flaw in them, so these locks use RFID technology. Lots of hotels use this particular brand for their door locks, and the hacker showed that using an NFC capable device like even an Android phone with NFC it's near field communication abilities, you can clone hotel key cards and use the cloned card to then access a room like you can make a master key this way. All you really need is an actual key card that was compatible with these systems and an NFC enabled device to send a signal to overwrite the information on that key card. You know, these cards are meant to be wiped and then re used, right, so if you can do that and you overwrite the info onto the key card, then you can create essentially a skeleton key that'll work on these locks. That includes being able to open dead bolts, because while you can't close a dead bolt on your hotel room door, typically these dead bolts are also connected to electronic systems, so that housekeeping, for example, can open the door even if you've closed the dead bolts. So really the only thing you're left with that can keep your door locked would be something like if it has a chain on it, or something similar along those lines. You know, something that you manually use to secure the door, and even then you know it's just another level of protection. It's not meant to keep everyone out forever. So researchers had already worked with Dormacaba and told them about this vulnerability, and the company has done an impressive amount of work to replace more than a third of the locks that were out there in the world that are vulnerable to this. But that means you still have around two thirds of the locks that are still vulnerable, and it could take years to replace most of those because apparently it's not just replacing the locks, it's updating the entire system so that that includes key cards and the encoders and everything like that. The researchers say that as far as they can tell, the exploit is not currently active in the wild, so that's something at least. But yeah, if you're going to be staying in a hotel, just you know, keep that in mind. You might want to make use of that safe in that hotel room if you can. Now, let's end with some fun news. There's a rumor circulating that Sony is preparing an upgraded PS five to launch in time for this year's holiday season. So this comes as Sony has said that the PS five is kind of entering the latter half of its life cycle, which is pretty wild to me. I still don't own a PS five or an Xbox Series X for that matter. The rumored PS five Pro should be able to deliver upscaled graphics and provide better performance and frame rates, but there's no confirmation on this story yet, so there's also no firm details to give about this console's stats or how much it's gonna cost. My guess is it'll be fairly expensive because Sony has stated that it plans to focus on profit for the last half of the PS five's life cycle. So it sounds to me like Sony's goal is not just to entice folks like me who never adopted the current generation of consoles, but to also convince people who already own a PS five to upgrade to the new model now. I think to do that, they're gonna have to really firmly demonstrate why this new PS five is going to be desirable. I don't think a boost in graphics or performance is going to be enough, like to say, like existing titles will run better and look better on this. I don't think that's gonna be quite enough to convince a lot of folks to upgrade. They're gonna need to have a decent library of launch title games that really demonstrate the value of the PS five pro if in fact this is their plan, because without those titles, there's not much of a sales pitch there unless it's for someone like me who just never got on one of the PS fives in the first place. And if I'm going to buy one, I'm more likely to go for, you know, the best version that's out there, rather than buy something that's been said to be on the end of its life cycle. And Sony is not the only company that's planning new hardware launches. Microsoft had a leak, a document leak that showed that a code name device called Brooklyn is a future Xbox hardware. It's like cylindrical in shape, which is interesting. And Nintendo reportedly is preparing to launch a follow up to the highly successful Switch handheld consoles, so should be looking at some new video game hardware in the not too distant future. Finally, I have a recommended article for y'all. It's from Time dot Com. It's by Will Henshall and it's titled Nobody Knows How to safety test AI, which you know, it's a bit of a problem. We all we recognize that AI can pose potential threats. That's clear that those threats range in severity from worrying about something that could cost a company millions of dollars or potentially replace people so that folks are out of a job, or all the way up to like AI powered weaponized systems that could potentially misidentify targets. I mean, there's pretty terrifying ways that AI could potentially harm us. But it's also hard to figure out how do we test for that, How do we discover how AI could potentially cause problems before we deploy that AI in the real world and just find out through experience that is an issue. So I recommend checking out that article if you're interested in learning more about that. That's it for this week's news. I hope all of you out there are well, and I will talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.