Senators show concern about how the FBI collected geolocation data without going through normal procedures. Google pays out a large settlement relating to how the company handled location tracking. Plus we have stories about facial recognition tech, how Tesla is under scrutiny for accidents (and for steering wheels popping off of SUVs) and more.
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and How the Tech are you Today? We're going to cover the tech news for Thursday, March nine, twenty twenty three. But before I get to that, I just want to thank bridget Todd, host of There Are No Girls on the Internet, or taking over the show yesterday. I hope you enjoyed that episode. You should definitely check out There Are No Girls on the Internet. There are three seasons of episodes. Season four is around the corner, and she does really great work and talks with some really smart and passionate people, and if you are one of those folks who gets really riled up about issues in society in general and tech in particular, you'll definitely want to tune into that. Okay, let's get to the tech news, and we're going to start off by following up on a story I talked about earlier this week, the sad Tale of Silvergate Bank. So, before twenty fourteen, this bank was primarily focused on serving as a financial institution in the real estate market in southern California, but then it hitched its wagon to the cryptocurrency market and started to work with crypto clients. So these markets need to connect to traditional financial institutions to be useful beyond the insular ecosystem of the crypto world. It wouldn't do you much good if you had all of your money in bitcoin, if there were no way to get your money out of bitcoin. Sure, you could use bitcoin to purchase some stuff, but the vast majority of transactions that you would need to make in your day to day life would likely exist outside of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. So you need financial institutions to facilitate movement on and off that ecosystem. Plus companies dealing with crypto they need banks too, and so Silvergate began to cater to this world. But as we all know, last year saw a series of disasters hit the crypto markets. Some cryptocurrencies imploded, we talked about that earlier this week. Crypto lenders and exchanges went under, and this ripple effect extended out beyond the immediate cryptocurrency ecosystem into the classic financial world in the form of Silvergate. The bank had operated its own exchange known as Silvergate exchange Network, which the company has already shut down. It held deposits for various crypto companies, but in the wake of these crypto disasters last year, particularly with FTX collapsing, customers withdrew an astonishing eight point one billion dollars from their silver Gate accounts. The company Silvergate had a billion dollar loss following this event, and now it sounds like the actual situation at Silvergate was even more dire than the PaperWorks seemed to indicate. This has led the Silvergate Capitol Corporation to announce that the bank is closing. It will return deposits to customers and then shut down, and it credited quote recent industry and regulatory developments end quote as the reason behind closing up shop. And to be fair, the US government is expected to look into Silvergate, possibly to see if there were any hinky things going on between Silvergate and FTX. But the fact of the matter is, even if nothing untoward was happening, even if everything was on the up and up, there was enough momentum and this collapse to lead to Silvergate's downfall. Now this news is bad for the entire crypto world. For one thing, the number of regulated financial institutions that can serve as a bridge for the crypto world has dropped by one, and there were not that many to start with. For another, we might see a rise in crypto companies being willing to make use of poorly regulated or even unregulated organizations for banking. And as we've already seen with crypto, a lack of regulation may not really be the feature, it might really be the bug. You know, we've had a lot of crypto enthusiasts say that the lack of regulation is a good thing, but twenty twenty two really showed that without regulation there's a lot of potential for things to go sideways. Now, if everyone's behaving properly, regulation wouldn't be necessary. But that's kind of true in most cases, regardless of what industry we're talking about, right, And we know that there are a lot of folks in the crypto community who are not having well. They are specifically looking for ways to take advantage of others. They are opportunists who don't mind speculating and ramping up and then rug pulling. It's clear there are plenty of folks who fall into that camp. Now, there's a third concern about Silvergate's collapse, which is that as Silvergate was in the eyes of say, regulators and governments, a quote unquote real financial institution, we're likely to see governments take a closer look and a deeper concern in the crypto market in general than we have already seen. Because it's one thing for these ephemeral ecosystems to crash in on themselves, right, that's a problem. People lose money, real people lose real money in the process. So governments are already concerned about that. But now we have an example of an established quote unquote real world bank also having to shut down as a result of the crypto market involvement. And when the consequences of the crypto world spill over into the traditional financial world, things can look really scary for governments and regulators. So, if anything, I imagine this is going to escalate efforts to regulate the crypto market, and in the meantime, I suspect we're going to see more volatility in the crypto world, which I mean, that's nothing, right, That's like throwing a dart and then drawing the dartboard around it, So you get a bullseye to say that there's going to be volatility in the crypto market. US Senator Ed Margie has promised to reintroduce a proposed ban for the federal government making use of facial recognition technology. Now, this comes in the wake of the American Civil Liberties Union or ACLU, publishing a piece that says the FBI and the Pentagon are both developing facial recognition technology, and as we have mentioned dozens of times on this show, this technology is inherently dangerous. Not only have we seen multiple instances in which a bias in the facial recognition model leads to misidentification, particularly for people of color. This in turns makes these people of color disproportionately affected by this technology's performance and leads to all sorts of terrible outcomes. But also, as Ed Markey points out, the use of such technology implies that all of us are being treated as if we are already suspects of a crime. From square one, everyone is being surveiled as if they are under suspicion. Everyone is being identified so that they can be tracked, so that when they do something wrong, we can be taken in. So, Marky argues that surveillance technology and facial recognition combined have served as a threat to individual citizens privacy and security. I find it really hard to find any fault in that argument. I agree with it. And here in the US, it's not just that the FBI wants to know who you are, it's also that it wants to know where you've been wired. Has a report that the FBI has been found to circumvent the normal legal process, and in fact has admitted to this. So normally the FBI would have to secure some sort of permission in order to get a look at someone's location data. Typically you're talking about a warrant process where you have to go to a court, submit your request, have a judge look it over and approve it, and then you could go and get hold of geolocation data. Instead, the FBI has admitted that in the past it has purchased US location data just like an advertising company would. In fact, Chris Ferray, the director of the FBI, said that that's essentially what the FBI did. It bought data from a broker, just like it had been an advertising company. And privacy advocates argue that all data being scooped up online is potentially harmful. They've been saying this for years, and this is the kind of thing that they're talking about as being one of the worst case scenarios, right, not just that private companies or even publicly traded companies have data about you, but that you start to see governments take advantage of loopholes and instead of going through due process in order to gain permission and have everything be documented when it comes to tracking people, it just sidesteps that and just buys the information outright instead of going through what it should be doing, because there aren't any specific rules or regulations to stop that from happening. Now, there are some rules in place that are meant to stop it, but federally speaking, it's not really been the highest of priorities, especially for US government agencies. Right. A lot of privacy laws specifically exclude government agency when it comes to the protection of private citizen data because here in the US we tend to favor the law enforcement over the citizens in some cases. So for the FBI to sidestep a legal process in order to get desired data that kind of stuff should concern everybody, regardless of how squeaky clean you are. The processes are there for a reason, and it's really to ensure that the government doesn't overstep and violate a citizen's rights. So when a law enforcement agency finds a loophole, that's a bad thing. The FBI admitted this particular instance during a Senate hearing on Global Threats. That's when Christopher Ray said that it was something that the FBI had done in the past, but that to his knowledge, the FBI was not currently doing it at this very moment. The admission raised concern the Senate, But the truth of the matter is that the US has been really lousy when it comes to protecting citizen data. So I don't know why anyone is surprised by this or shocked by it. They should be concerned about it, But to hear people express surprise that this has happened seems disingenuous to me. But then again, it's also to be fair, a lot of people who are in politics in the United States are so out of touch when it comes to technology, and especially when it comes to things like data collection and data analysis. Maybe they're genuinely surprised because of a large blind spot in their knowledge base. Not that same hearing, FBI's director Ray told the Senate that TikTok is a potential national security threat, which echoes the concerns of lawmakers around the world. So Ray claimed that TikTok could potentially give parent company byte Dance the ability to quote control data and software on millions of devices in the US and drive narratives to divide Americans. End quote. Now, to be clear, I'm not saying Ray said that specifically. That's how it was worded by Bloomberg. They did not use quotations, so this is not Ray saying it, but it's what Bloomberg said Ray said, I honestly don't know about this claim. I don't even know if Ray actually said that TikTok could potentially control software on millions of devices. I haven't seen any security experts suggest that TikTok has that ability, and I think that would be a massive headline. I mean, if someone found that a single app on a device had the capability to potentially control other software to any real degree, that would be huge news. And I don't know that Ray said anything close to that. This could just be Bloomberg mischaracterizing what Ray was saying. Anyway, I'm not surprised by this take. Right It's a pretty popular view in the government right now that TikTok is potentially a surveillance tool for the Chinese state, and if it isn't right now, it has that ability in the future. So this kind of goes along with other things we've been hearing recently in those circles. Okay, let's get back to geolocation data tracking before we take our first break. Google has agreed to pay out a nearly three hundred ninety two million dollars settlement to end a massive lawsuit involving the state attorneys general for forty out of the fifty US states. So the core issue is that these state attorneys general had argued Google had misled users when they chose to turn off location data tracking because Google was still collecting location information about these users. And yeah, that does seem like there might be a bit of a disconnect, you know, like, oh, you've turned off location tracking, but don't worry, we're still keeping track of where you are. You know, you don't seem to understand what location tracking means and what it means to turn it off. So Google said that this issue was related to quote, outdated product policies that we changed years ago end quote. So they're not denying that they did this, they're saying they don't do it anymore. So according to Google, now when you turn off location tracking, then it for reels would turn it off, at least for Google anyway. The details of the settlement include requirements that Google has to meet in order to institute some changes, such as introducing more alerts whenever a user activates a feature, whether an app or otherwise that would turn on or off a location related data tracking component. So that's good, all right, We're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, We've got some more tech news to talk about. We're back. Not that long ago, I talked about Anonymous, the loosely organized activist group, and according to Taiwan News, this group has claimed responsibility for hacking into a Chinese weather balloon that flew over India twice. And then they hacked into a Chinese website that actually related to a study abroad program, and there they posted not a manifesto but are really kind of rambling list of complaints and allegations, as well as screenshots of the hacked control panel of the weather balloon. Now, presumably Anonymous decided to target this balloon after the recent discovery of surveillance balloons of Chinese origin that flew over North America and eventually the US shot him down. Anonymous but also throw in some other reasons on this website, so it starts to almost feel like a laundry list of unconnected complaints. So one of the things that they cited was China's response to COVID nineteen and how the government has treated that over the last couple of years, So that was part of the stuff that was included in there, but also there were bits praising Taiwan. Taiwan and China have a contentious relationship, to say the least, technically both sides lay claim to the other. On the web page, Anonymous also railed against some unrelated stuff that has nothing to do with China, like Wikipedia and its policies. Anonymous said that women are underrepresented in Wikipedia articles and that there might be an issue with bias within Wikipedia, and that the articles occasionally engage in outright trying to manipulate perspectives in points of view. There's also some stuff about people who have been killed by US police and various police incidents, so kind of a related to Black Lives Matter. There were also parts arguing that the Soviet Union which hasn't been a thing for decades now, But how the USS are endangered human lives and outright killed animals as part of the space race. So again, it's like this mishmash hodgepodge of complaints that don't necessarily have a centralized theme that appeared on this web page. It almost seemed like, well, we've got the opportunity, let's take it. I don't pretend to understand it, but it's not a huge surprise, right, if you know anything about Anonymous, it should not be surprising that it would be a little disjointed, because Anonymous is such a loose organization, and it's filled with people who have overlapping but not necessarily identical motivations and priorities. So you could say, well, yeah, it seems a bit a bit chaotic, but then so is the very nature of Anonymous itself. That's part of its its structure. Earlier this week, Reuters reported that the German government is considering a ban on Huawei components in its five G networks, along with components from some other Chinese companies as well. Now, as I've talked about before, the US instituted such a ban out of concern that Huawei could essentially tap into, you know, the communications infrastructure and then spy on communications within the US. The UK has taken similar measures now. Huawei has repeatedly denied these allegations and suspicions, saying that the company has never done such a thing, that there aren't any backdoors or anything built into the technology that would allow for it in the first place. A spokesperson for China's embassy in Germany said, whahwe follows EU and German laws and there's no reason to suspect that the company would undermine those laws, and that China is just very disappointed in Germany right now and expected better. So this decision hasn't yet been finalized. Its possible that Germany will not pursue this route. Even if it does, it would probably take years to fully decouple Germany's telecommunications infrastructure from Chinese components. But it does show that there is this growing concern about how technology. You know, more and more of our technology is ultimately just meant to direct information somewhere, and that if you could end up directing that information in a way that benefits one country at the expense of others, that ends up being a big concern. Whether or not that's actually happening is still at question, but even just the potential for it is enough to give companies pause. And to be clear, I don't know if Huawei has actively participated in surveillance on behalf of China, but I do know that there is a very large concern for that. And it doesn't help that the Chinese government has essentially given a directive to citizens and companies that they are to participate in information gathering activities would benefit China. So whether it's happening or not, I can't say. I can just say that there are enough pieces in place that I can understand the concern. Toward the end of last year, YouTube changed some rules that ended up having a massive impact on YouTubers. If you follow any particular channels, you've probably noticed this, either explicitly as people have actually addressed this in their videos, or just through the process of watching it and thinking, huh, something's changed here. So late last year, YouTube started to really crack down on stuff like profanity, and any video that included profanity within the first fifteen seconds of the video starting was automatically made ineligible for monetization. Didn't matter how severe it was. It just meant that, you know, if you had a profanity incident within those first fifteen seconds, boom monetization switched off for that video. And if you were a YouTuber with an intro like what the beep is up? This is your beep, Homeboy, Beep Smith, Beep the beep like that, well, then you'd be looking at all those videos that start that way getting demonetized. Because this change wasn't just for all videos moving forward, it was a retroactive change. YouTube would scan the content of all videos posted, and if any of them were detected to include profanity within the verse fifteen seconds, boom shut off. And a video on YouTube can have a really long life. You know. Typically you see your biggest amount of engagement shortly after a video publishes, but some videos have a really long tail, especially if something relevant happens in the world that brings back a video that was recorded a long time ago. I'm reminded of a video I did years ago at how Stuff Works about the Transatlantic accent. You know that old timey radio voice. I did a video about at and every few years it seems to bubble back up and get popular again. So while it did pretty well when it launched. In subsequent years, it would get tons more views. Well, if I were depending upon monetization of videos like that, I don't own those videos that belongs to how stuff works. But if I did, and if those videos violated a brand new rule from the platform, well that would have an enormous impact on my ability to make a living. Right, And because I don't control the platform, I'm at the whim of that platform. This is why it's risky to depend upon a third party in order to reach your audience. If the platform makes a change to its business model, you end up being affected. I'm minded of When I talked to Bernie Burns, one of the founders of Rooster Teeth, this was one of his big concerns. He said, you don't want to put all your eggs in the basket that belongs to someone else, because if they change their mind on how stuff works, you end up being hit by that. Well, now YouTube is relaxing some of those rules. They're not getting rhythm, but they are relaxing them a little bit. Videos that include moderate profanity within the first fifteen seconds can get some limited monetization. Videos that don't involve a ton of profanity and they avoid it within the first seven seconds are eligible for full monetization. And YouTube is also introducing a review process to look into creators who have been hit hard by this change in monetization, where like they may have seen their income go close to zilch after the results. The new adjustments went into effect this week, so hopefully creators who are hit really hard we'll see some relief. I will admit there's some channels I watch where there were people who would occasionally use profanity, and they now tend to beat that stuff out rather than actually say the words, which they used to do. And I think the reason for it is because they don't want to see those monetization switches get hit and then they take a massive revenue loss. Over at Meta, there's been a leak. Meta introduced its own large language model aka Lama, and they opened it up to a very small group of people. It's like invitation only, case by case basis and includes like academics and researchers, a few companies, and they're essentially asking these folks to test the language model, to provide feedback let Meta help improve it over time. The company did not release it to the general public, probably because like all other generative AI models, Meta's approach is prone to doing stuff that isn't always appropriate. Generative AI can sometimes spout out misinformation. They compare it speech, It could call for violence, like it can generally behave in ways that are not a good look for the company that spawned it, particularly a large, public facing, publicly traded company. So Meta did a limited release because this model is still under development. It is not ready to be deployed. It's still being built. But someone went and leaked the model. Word popped up on four Chan, and initially you started to see torrents and peer to peer network sharing kind of spread this around, and eventually somebody put it up on GitHub and people have included instructions on how to download and access the language model. I'm sure folks at Meta are stressed out about this, but some people in the AI industry argue that the tool is far more likely to improve quickly if it's in a wide release as opposed to trusting a relatively small base of researchers kind of the open source approach. And that is true, but it also you know, you can understand the concern on Meta's part, right, like if it were to get out that a tool made by Meta was used to generate AI created misinformation in order to polarize people against one another. That wouldn't look good. Even though you could argue that's not really Meta's fault because they never intended that tool to get released out to the public, you can understand where there'd be the resistance there. I got a couple of Tesla stories today. Safety regulators in the United States are once again scrutinizing Tesla in the wake of reports that for a couple of suv drivers there's this doozy of an issue that sometimes crops up, namely that the steering wheel reportedly just plane comes off sometimes. On Wednesday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration or in HTSA, released documents about investigation into the model Y Tesla suv and how the steering wheel reportedly can detach from the steering column. This, as I understand it, is considered a bad thing. It's not that these steering wheels are just inherently flimsy, but that in at least two cases, a bolt that is meant to hold the steering wheel to the column just wasn't there. It didn't get installed so the wheel was just attached to the column through a friction fit. But it's a steering wheel. That means you turn the wheel and all that turning is like, you know, wiggling something loose, and over time the wheel does come loose and ultimately can come off, and that's really scary obviously. Now, according to the NHTSA, both cases in which a steering wheel came off happened while the vehicles were still relatively low in mileage, so it doesn't take very long for this to manifest. It is hard to say if this issue has affected a large number of vehicles or if these two cases that the NHTSA has reported our outliers. It is possible that this is an issue that has happened obviously more than once, but not throughout the entire fleet of SUVs. That being said, if you do own a model Y SUV and it's relatively new, you might want to check to see if that bolt is actually present to hold the steering wheel in place, which might mean having to take it to a dealership. So just good to know. The other big story about Tesla involves a fatal accident back in February. A driver and passenger in a twenty fourteen Tesla Model S crashed into a firetruck that was parked along a highway, blocking one of the lanes. It was acting as a barrier for firefighters as they will responding to a different crash. The Models crashed into the firetruck. It killed the Model s's driver, it critically injured the passenger. Firefighters had to use special tools to cut the Tesla open to get at the people inside. Four firefighters had some injuries as well as a result of this crash, and the NHTSA has launched an investigation to see if the Model S was in driver assist mode aka autopilot, or potentially even full self driving mode. This is part of a larger NHTSA investigation into accidents involving Tesla's that were in autopilot mode and then crashed into a parked emergency vehicle on a highway. Apparently, there have been at least fifteen cases of Tesla's doing this while in driver assist mode. That obviously raises questions about how Tesla detects or fails to detect parked emergency vehicles along highways. News outlets have reached out to Tesla for comment. But seeing as how Tesla has followed the Twitter model that Musk set out, namely, it doesn't have a public relations department, it might be hard to get a quote. Okay, I got a couple more stories I want to talk about Before I get to that, Let's take another quick break. Okay, just before the break, I was talking a little bit about Musk, and I got more to say about the Muskie billionaire. He had a pretty public situation blow up in his face this week on Twitter. It got ugly. So at the center of the issue is a well now former Twitter employee named Holly thor Leafson. Holly was trying to get confirmation on whether or not he had been fired, because it seemed like he had, but no one was telling him for sure. And you might think, Wow, things have got to be screwy at Twitter if you don't even know if you've been fired or not. But it gets worse than that. You see, Holley is not your typical Twitter employee. Back in twenty twenty one, he ran a creative agency called Ueno, which Twitter subsequently acquired, and Holly joined Twitter as part of this deal, and the scuttle butt in the industry, because Holly's pretty quiet about this. He's indicated some of this is true, but hasn't given particulars. But the scuttle butt is that Holly's compensation essentially is pulling from a very large pool of money that was part of this acquisition. Then, instead of getting a lump sum for the acquisition of this company he was brought on as an employee, is being paid out on the money that would have been for the acquisition. And if he were to be fired, Twitter would owe him the rest of that money, unless it was like a four cause reason, like if Hallie had done embezzelment or something, then obviously he would not be contractually obligated that money. But if he was fired without cause, then he would be due this massive amount of money that was part of the acquisition. Now let me give you a little bit more information on this guy. He has muscular dystrophy and he uses a wheelchair. He's from Iceland and he has long campaign the land government and the people for better wheelchair access throughout the country. He even negotiated his Twitter compensation package so that he actually pays more taxes to Iceland. As I said, he pays more in taxes because he believes in the change he's asking for and he's willing to help pay for it. Anyway, Holly ended up tweeting to Elon Musk to ask for clarification because he was frankly getting nowhere through other channels. Though throughout the process of that back and forth, he did get confirmation that he had been fired, and Musk, in his trademarked way, responded poorly. So first he clearly didn't know who how he was, and he asked what work how he had been doing. So he responds with that, and then Elon responded in a response that has subsequently been deleted in little laughing emojis, as if saying ha, as if this is anything worth even talking about how he actually initially didn't even tell him what it was, because he said, if I talk about it, then I'm breaking confidentiality agreements. I need to see that those confidentiality agreements are waved before I talk about what I've been working on. And Elon then cavalierly waves those agreements. They consider them put aside. So Hollie then said, and then this goes back and forth a bit, and then the next day after it came out, that how he said he had in fact been fired. Elon must tweeted about Hallie and said that quote, He's the worst. Sorry, and he then later would delete that quote or that tweet. But you know, just because something's been deleted doesn't mean the internet forgets. The Internet never forgets. Musk also posted quote, the reality is that this guy, who is independently wealthy, did no actual work, claimed as his excuse that he had a disability that prevented him from typing, yet was simultaneously tweeting up a storm. Can't say I have a lot of respect for that now, Halle. He has had an incredible reputation in the tech field, like the people who have worked with him have nothing but great things to say about him. To say that he is highly admired is putting it lightly, and Musk got considerable pushback after doing his typical billionaire idiot approach into waiting into something he doesn't know anything about, and so ultimately he goes and has a conversation with Halle over the phone to get a better understanding, and then he tweets a non apology, essentially as an apology of I was misled. I heard things that ended up not being true. So it's not my fault that I said all these stupid things on Twitter that I've deleted so can't see him anymore. Yeah, my opinion of Musk is obviously low, and it always has been, but it just keeps going down, and I admit that that's my own bias. If you love Musk, you know, I'm sure you have your reasons. I'm just I can't communicate this without bringing my own personal opinion into it. Anyway. What Musk also said was quote better to talk to people than communicate via tweet end quote, because he was backpedaling right. He was saying, Oh, turns out I didn't really understand the situation. I was told wrong things or things that were true but don't really matter, like it was all non apology stuff, and then he says better to talk to people than communicate via tweet. This is insane, folks, because he's the fricking CEO of Twitter. He spent billions of dollars to buy Twitter. Twitter is a communications platform and he's saying it's not good for communication Asians. What Elon must have just said is Twitter is not a good choice for doing what Twitter is supposed to do. This is if you're trying to lead your company which is already in like dire straits and trying to lead it to climb out of that, Saying that it's not good for communicating with people is probably a bad move anyway. He then said that Hollie is reconsidering working with Twitter, that the whole firing thing was a big misunderstanding. It shouldn't have happened. Uh. You know, Holly has said that he suspects that this is because again, if he were to be fired, he would be owed this huge amount of money. He has essentially said, Hey, I'm ready to walk away from Twitter. You owe me, So are you gonna pay me? Are you gonna pay the money though you owe me? That's actually a really good question because Twitter is currently you know, under fire for not paying all of its bills like rent and stuff. So it's a it's not guarantee that Twitter would pay what was actually contractually owed to this guy, because Twitter has been not paying a lot of bills so far. Yeah. Terrible, terrible situation. And once again elon eliminating public relations teams means that this kind of stuff, when it happens, there's no one there to step in and handle things, handle communications in a way that doesn't escalate into a situation that could have been avoided from the very beginning. But elon being elon just meant that this got way worse anyway. I think Holley seems like a really interesting dude, like has has spent a ton of money to try and improve his home country, especially for people who are in a similar situation that he's in. So cheers to you, buddy, because man, this was just like a redeeculous, drama filled event that did not need to happen. Finally, this is a pretty cool news story. It's some science news to close out this show. Researchers in Australia have isolated an enzyme found in bacteria that live in the soil. This particular enzyme can convert hydrogen, the trace amounts of hydrogen that are in the atmosphere into electricity. That's really cool. Now, according to what I've read, this enzyme can take the trace amounts of hydrogen and the atmosphere turn it into an electrical current. The enzyme is called HUC, which I'm just going to pronounce this hook And I'm already seeing a lot of predictions that this enzyme could be the cornerstone for future technologies that harvest electricity from the air itself. A lot of headlines talk about making electricity from thin air. That would be super cool. However, before we just start imagining Tesla esque future in which we're pulling electricity from the air itself, we should remember hydrogen does not make up very much of our atmosphere. Like, when I say not very much, I'm talking about like point zero zero zero zero five percent of our atmosphere is hydrogen. And when you have such tiny amounts present, there's just not enough fuel there to generate electricity to do anything beyond powering perhaps very very basic, very low power components. Even a simple watch would require way more power than what this enzyme could produce, not because the enzyme isn't impressive, it is, but just because there's just not enough free hydrogen in the air. Now. I've talked several times on the show about how hydrogen tends to bond with other elements, So getting pure hydrogen usually means you have to take something that's made of hydrogen bonded with other stuff, and then pour some energy into it to break those molecular bonds. The classic example is using electrolysis, where you pass an electric current through water and this helps break that molecular bond between hydrogen and oxygen so that you get oxygen and hydrogen gas. But you know, that's one way to get hydrogen, but that's not useful for this enzyme, right, Like the enzyme is meant to pull hydrogen out of the air. There's just not enough there to do anything super useful beyond like powering, like I said, extremely low power features or functions. So I think it's really cool. I think as the potential for some interesting applications, like like maybe some very low power sensor type stuff. But it's not anywhere remotely close to being able to harvest significance amount of electricity from thin air. And I wanted to say that because a lot of the headlines I'm seeing essentially say pulling electricity from thin air. And maybe in the article it goes into the qualifiers about that, but if you're just reading headlines, you might walk away with the assumption that, oh, we're gonna pull electricity out of the air itself, all of our electrical concerns are gone, Like we don't have to worry about our energy needs anymore. Stop pouring money into things like renewables because we can pull electricity from the air itself. That's not really the case. So always, always, always use critical thinking when you're looking at things like science news in particular, because a lot of science communicators are really good at expressing passion about science, but if they don't give you the full story, you might walk away with an accurate perspective on what they're actually trying to communicate. Okay, that's it for this episode. Hope you are all well. If you have suggestions for future topics of tech stuff, reach out to me on Twitter. You can tweet me at tech stuff HSW or you can download the iHeartRadio app free to download, free to use. Just pop on over to that and then you use the little search engine to search for tech stuff. That'll take you to the tech stuff page. You'll see there's a little microphone icon there. You click on that you can leave a voice message up to thirty seconds in link. Let me know what you would like to hear, 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.