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 iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for the week ending Friday, April twenty sixth, twenty twenty four, and first up. I covered one really big news item earlier this week on Wednesday's episode, which is that the US Senate approved a bill that gives the Chinese company byte Dance one year to divest itself of TikTok or else face a nationwide band. President Biden signed that bill into law as was expected. And the only other update I really have is that Reuter's reports Byteedance would rather choose to shut TikTok down than to sell it off to someone else. Of course, that's not likely to happen right away. I mean, for one thing, they have a year, but by Dance also plans to challenge the law on constitutional grounds, as do others, So we have a ways to go before this story ends one way or the other, whether courts uphold it or say that in fact, it's unconstitutional. And if you're wondering why bite Dance would rather just scuttle all operations in the United States and just call it a loss. It really comes down to that juicy recommendation algorithm that TikTok uses, you know, the one that former engineers for an earlier app called ninety nine fongs say is their work and that they should be compensated for it. Byte Dance does not want to part with that algorithm. It is a key component of other apps that the company owns and operates, including the Chinese cousin to TikTok do Yin. And that's it for the update for that story. This week, the US Federal Communiticationations Commission, or FCC reinstated some, but not all, of net neutrality regulations in the United States. So as a quick reminder, net neutrality covers a fairly broad spectrum of concepts, but you can kind of boil it down to say that the rules mean all companies that provide internet infrastructure agree to let all traffic cross their networks without interference, no matter who it's from, to whom it's going, or what kind of device the endpoint is using. So under net neutrality, a provider would not give advantages to their own content while throttling traffic from competitors. So if you got your Internet service from Comcast, Comcasts wouldn't be allowed to put its own services on a fast lane while inhibiting stuff from like you know, Netflix or Max or Hulu or whatever, or charging those companies an arm in a leg in order to also be in the fast lane. The measure passed three to two in the FCC. It went right down party lines, which is pretty much par for the course these days. So three Democratic appointees voted for it and to Republican appointees voted against it. Now, to be clear, this is not the first time the FCC has established net neutrality rules. It did so under the Obama administration, but then under the Trump administration the FCC revoked those earlier rules, so this should really indicate that these rules are far from set in stone. A tech analyst named Ming chi Quo has posted in Medium that Apple has scaled back its production of the Vision Pro mixed reality headsets. So, according to this post, Apple initially expected a demand of seven hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand headsets, but this cut will bring it down to a little bit around the half of that. Like four hundred thousand to four hundred and fifty thousand units. Further, the post says that Apple expects sales to dip even more next year, and that the company has adjusted its product roadmap as a result. So Apple often releases updated models of its various tech platforms from year to year, like Max and iPhones and that kind of thing. But the post says that the company is no longer planning to release a new headset in twenty twenty five. So could it be that mixed reality is one arena in which Apple's reality distortion field just doesn't extend. So in the past I've predicted that various Apple products wouldn't go very far. I mean, the iPad is a really big example of one where I whiffed big time. So I've been so incredibly wrong in the past. But maybe the challenges of getting a broad audience for a mixed reality headset are too great even for Apple, and to be fear to the company, mixed reality is a very tough sell. I mean, the headsets are expensive. You know, you have to wear them on your head, so that's got a strike against it for a lot of people. And there's a very limited number of applications for these headsets right now. Despite the fact that what they do appears to be really incredible, it's a a very limited set of things that they do, so with all of these things taken into account, it's tough to get traction. So it's a pretty big uphill battle, and I don't think Apple's gonna win it. Tesla has had a wild week that I think proves the point that if we live inside a computer simulation, there's some serious bugs in the programming. So Tesla held its twenty twenty four Q one earnings call this week, and the company revealed that, at least according to The Verge, Tesla's net income is down nine percent year over year and has hit a six year low. Oh and quote, net income attributable to common stockholders has slid fifty five percent end quote. That's according to Andrew Hawkins of The Verge, and he attributes this both to Tesla's price cutting efforts and cooling demand for evs among the buying public. Elon Musk says the auto industry in general has pivoted from EV's back to hybrids, and that certainly is going on here in America. I mean, we have seen a few different auto manufacturers switch gears to use a pun and to favor hybrids over evs for at least the near term. The earnings call included a section that teased Tesla's upcoming robotaxi product, which we're told we're going to hear more about on August eighth. I'll remind you that, according to various states that have regulatory requirements for autonomous taxi services, Tesla has not yet begun the licensing procedures to get permission to operate such a service in those states. Now, maybe that's changed since the initial teas of the robotaxi service. Maybe Tesla has started to file that paperwork. I haven't heard that. But what happened after this earnings call is where things really went bonkers from me. So you had this earnings call, things sound dire. You know, you're down significantly from the previous year, and the stock price would surge twelve percent in trading on Wednesday. So I told you is a mad world out there. The stockholder enthusiasm appears to be linked to things like the upcoming robotaxi effort, Musk claiming that Tesla isn't so much an auto manufacturer as it is a digital platform, as well as Musk's announcement that the company plans to introduce new models early next year, if not sooner. I have no idea if any of that is realistic. Keep in mind, we're also talking about the same company that had delayed the launch of the cyber truck numerous times before it finally rolled off lots. But the shareholders seem happy for now. In other Muskie news, Elon's Ai company x Ai, because Elon Musk continues to be obsessed with the letter x is getting close to raising six billion with a B dollars in investments on evaluation of eighteen billion dollars. According to tech Crunch. Not that long ago, the numbers looked a lot different. It was more like an effort to raise three billion dollars with evaluation of fifteen billion. But various heavy hitting and groups charged forward to get a piece of the action, and Xai quickly tweaked those numbers. So it's kind of like running a lemonade stand. You know, you've been selling tall, frosty glasses of tangy lemonade for like twenty five cents, but then there's this great lemon blight that wipes out nearly all lemons except for the ones that you have. And it also coincides with like a massive heat wave, and you've got the market cornered on your sweet and sour zipper, so you hike the price to five bucks for a shot. Anyway, the sales pitch for XAI sounds like something from a science fiction film where we find out how the killer robots got their start. So, namely, Musk plans to leverage data from his various other companies to use as training information for the AI developed by XAI. So those businesses include stuff like x formerly known as Twitter, which is a stakeholder in XAI, SpaceX, Tesla, and even Neuralink that's the brain computer interface company that Musk has. So Musk's vision is a world in which all these other businesses are feeding his XAI with real world data and experience and thus accelerating that AI's learning patterns, and voila, we get miracle robots and such. I remain skeptical. Now, a quick hop away from Tesla will take us over to a story about Fisker, which is an electric vehicle auto company that, according to SFGate dot com, is now on the brink of collapse. Huh, I'm business on the brink. That would actually be a really good name for a podcast. Anyway, this week, Fisker filed with the SEC and revealed that the company is pretty much broke. Back in March, it was unable to make an interest payment. Now, granted, it was a whopper of an interest payment, it was eight point four million dollars. But the filing revealed that, you know, this company, Fisker is on borrowed time. So unless creditors give the company some serious slack or it hits some crazy financial windfall, the screw will need to file for bankruptcy within thirty days. The filing doesn't sugarcoat things either. Essentially, it says giving us more money is really risky because we haven't proven we're able to do what we need to do. But yeah, we've seen a few stories about startups attempting to establish a foothold in the auto industry. More often than not, it does not work out. Okay, we've got a lot more news stories to get through before we get to that. Let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. We're back and we're going to take a little stroll over to Meta Meta also held an earnings call this week, but investors were not nearly as charmed by the revelations as those who were following the Tesla announcements. The call began with talk about AI to no big surprise, and then Zuckerberg also talked about the metaverse, which is funny because you don't hear that term bandied about nearly as much these days. I think AI I largely displaced the metaverse concept that became like the new thing that business leaders got excited about. But as CNBC's Ashley Caput put said, quote, he spent almost the entirety of his opening remarks focused on the many ways Meta loses money end quote, Mizcaput, I believe you have spilt some tea all over the place. But yeah, Meta is very good at spending a lot of money on stuff that isn't making very much by comparison. So, for example, Reality Labs brought in four hundred and forty million dollars in sales, and that's a lot of cheddar, but that same division racked up a financial loss of three point eighty five billion dollars. Anyway, Zuckerberg also seemed prepared for the financial blow that would follow this earnings call because he acknowledged that investors are generally not very happy about Meta spending billions of dollars on projects that are not yet monetizable. Sure enough, in the wake of the earnings call, Meta's stock price dropped nineteen percent in extended trading at some points. As for the future, Zuckerberg revealed that the company estimates capital expenditures for twenty twenty four to be in the thirty five billion to forty billion dollar range. That's more than what the company had previously estimated, So I guess making the future is real expensive. Microsoft also had an earnings call this week, and the company explained that the absolute rush to develop AI has meant the demand for cloud based computing power is greater than the supply of resources. So the report showed that Microsoft has increased capital expenditures by nearly eighty percent year over year in an effort to meet this demand to build out things like data centers and such, and the company is going to have to spend even more in the next couple of years in order to really feed the hungry beast that is AI. This is kind of like seeing Parkinson's law of data on steroids, So Parkinson's law of data in case you don't know what that is, it says that information will fill any space made available to it, like it doesn't matter how big your library or filing cabinet or storage drive is, any way of having a way of retaining information, it will fill up. Like I remember when we would get a computer with a hard drive like one hundred and twenty eight megabytes or something, and I'd think, oh, we'll never fill all this up, which was ridiculous obviously, Well, this seems to be that same kind of issue. The compute power instead of storage power just will get swallowed up as soon as you make it available. Microsoft keeps adding to it, and customers in the form of companies running these AI implementations just buy it right up. But the expenditures that Microsoft is making in order to meet this demand so far are actually outpacing income. So that could be a sticky wicket. At some point you could meet a tipping point where it just you're spending more money than you could possibly bring back in, especially if some of these startup AI companies of fizzle out. So we'll have to see where this kind of levels out. I'm sure there will be a point, I don't know when that'll happen. Google is facing sanctions in South Korea after that nation's Fair Trade Commission, the Korea's version of FTC, determined that Google's practice of giving YouTube Premium subscribers access to YouTube Music as well essentially amounts to bundling these services together and is an anti competitive practice that has hurt domestic companies streaming platforms. So YouTube Music became the top music streaming service in the Korean market, it surpassed even the native Korean services, and the FTC launched an investigation into the matter last year and now is preparing to determine sanctions. But meanwhile, Korean companies are saying this is too little, too late, and that the whole determination process is just far too long to be of any good because by the time a decision has arrived at the damage has already been done. Meanwhile, the u US FTC, in our case, it's the Federal Trade Commission, ruled that companies are no longer allowed to force employees into non compete agreements. This applies across all industries, obviously, but inside the tech world it is a particularly huge development. Companies have long relied on non competes to prevent employees from jumping ship and working with a competitor, potentially bringing valuable skills and knowledge to that competitor. In fact, some of the podcasters you listen to may have non compete clauses in their work agreements, you know, like ones you might be listening to right now. But the FTC says that kind of thing is not going to fly anymore. And you, as you might imagine, that decision has not exactly been met with universal approval among corporations out there, including tech companies. So on the contrary, industry groups are already suing the FTC, arguing that the agency lacks the authority to make and enforce such a ruling. This rule will go into effect on August twenty second of this year, at which point all current non competes, at least for anyone who isn't in an executive policy making position and earning you know, more than one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, all non competes will be null and void, and companies will not be allowed to issue new ones. The lawsuits will continue until a final decision is made. My guess is that ultimately this is going to have to go all the way to the Supreme Court. That's going to take years. So in the meantime, I say, make hay while the sun shines. Okay, I got a couple of weird AI stories to get throughs. First up is a case in Maryland in which the athletic director for a high school was found to have used AI to impersonate the voice of that school's principle. So the accusation goes that this athletic director fabricated and audio recording using an AI copy of the principal's voice, and this recording included some really awful stuff like racist and antisemitic messaging. Apparently this all happened back in January when the principle informed the athletic director that his contract was not going to be renewed. There were various issues and problems with this particular staff member. The athletic director then fabricated the recording and posted it to social media, which prompted a viral response. It led to the principle being placed on leave. And now it's revealed that the whole thing was a fraud. And I'm sure we'll never hear of any other outlandish potentially criminal uses of AI in voice replication technology, he said sarcastically. The other weird AI story deals with Drake and it's about a disk track. And yes, I know how lame it is to hear me say the phrase disc track. I have not earned any place at all within rap or hip hop culture, but anyway, this particular track was aimed at Kendrick Lamar, and the track included a recording of an AI impersonation of Tupac Shakur, who, of course died at the age of twenty five. Way back in nineteen ninety six. Shaquur's estate issued a cease and desist order against Drake and threaten legal actions saying that the estate did not give permission for the use of Shakur's audio likeness on this track. Shakur wasn't the only artist who is replicated for the purposes of hyping up Drake and or dissing Lamar. Snoop Dogg was also copied by AI, and you know Snoop dog is very much alive. The issue really highlights the legal gaps that currently exist with regard to technology's ability to copy not just a specific work, but a person's voice or style. Those sorts of things aren't eligible for copyright. You cannot copyright a voice or a style. You have to have something that's set down in some sort of established format for it to be eligible for copyright. So in the absence of copyright protection, the best avenue for those who have been copied tends to relate to publicity rights, which doesn't really apply to most of us. It's really more of something that applies to notable people. But anyway, I'm sure we'll never hear of any other versions of this very problem due to AI sarcasm. Again in good space news, NASA was able to fix some issues with the Voyager one spacecraft, which is currently the human made object that is furthest from its home planet. Voyager is in interstellar space, and last year the spacecraft had a malfunction that prevented it from being able to send data back to Earth. So for months, engineers at NASA worked to fix this problem, and now Voyager can send at least some data relating to its health and operations back to US, and NASA hopes to get other operations online in the near future. The solution largely revolved around addressing operations to different sectors of the computer system's memory. That must have been hard, because we're not talking about a massive amount of space here. I mean there's a massive amount of outer space, sure, but not a massive amount of computer memory space. Voyager has long since completed its primary mission, which was, along with Voyager two, to observe the outer planets of our Solar system, and now it's giving us information on the nature of interstellar space, which is pretty darn cool. Okay, I've gotten article recommendation for y'all before I sign off. It's from torrent Freak. It was written by Andy Maxwell. It's titled us Know Your Customer proposal will put an end to anonymous cloud users, which is alarming. The piece explains the whole issue, including the reasons behind wanting to clamp down on anonymity in the first place, and how this could impact services such as VPNs and such. It's well worth your time. That's it for this week. I hope you're all well, and I'll 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. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for the week ending Friday, April twenty sixth, twenty twenty four, and first up. I covered one really big news item earlier this week on Wednesday's episode, which is that the US Senate approved a bill that gives the Chinese company byte Dance one year to divest itself of TikTok or else face a nationwide band. President Biden signed that bill into law as was expected. And the only other update I really have is that Reuter's reports Byteedance would rather choose to shut TikTok down than to sell it off to someone else. Of course, that's not likely to happen right away. I mean, for one thing, they have a year, but by Dance also plans to challenge the law on constitutional grounds, as do others, So we have a ways to go before this story ends one way or the other, whether courts uphold it or say that in fact, it's unconstitutional. And if you're wondering why bite Dance would rather just scuttle all operations in the United States and just call it a loss. It really comes down to that juicy recommendation algorithm that TikTok uses, you know, the one that former engineers for an earlier app called ninety nine fongs say is their work and that they should be compensated for it. Byte Dance does not want to part with that algorithm. It is a key component of other apps that the company owns and operates, including the Chinese cousin to TikTok do Yin. And that's it for the update for that story. This week, the US Federal Communiticationations Commission, or FCC reinstated some, but not all, of net neutrality regulations in the United States. So as a quick reminder, net neutrality covers a fairly broad spectrum of concepts, but you can kind of boil it down to say that the rules mean all companies that provide internet infrastructure agree to let all traffic cross their networks without interference, no matter who it's from, to whom it's going, or what kind of device the endpoint is using. So under net neutrality, a provider would not give advantages to their own content while throttling traffic from competitors. So if you got your Internet service from Comcast, Comcasts wouldn't be allowed to put its own services on a fast lane while inhibiting stuff from like you know, Netflix or Max or Hulu or whatever, or charging those companies an arm in a leg in order to also be in the fast lane. The measure passed three to two in the FCC. It went right down party lines, which is pretty much par for the course these days. So three Democratic appointees voted for it and to Republican appointees voted against it. Now, to be clear, this is not the first time the FCC has established net neutrality rules. It did so under the Obama administration, but then under the Trump administration the FCC revoked those earlier rules, so this should really indicate that these rules are far from set in stone. A tech analyst named Ming chi Quo has posted in Medium that Apple has scaled back its production of the Vision Pro mixed reality headsets. So, according to this post, Apple initially expected a demand of seven hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand headsets, but this cut will bring it down to a little bit around the half of that. Like four hundred thousand to four hundred and fifty thousand units. Further, the post says that Apple expects sales to dip even more next year, and that the company has adjusted its product roadmap as a result. So Apple often releases updated models of its various tech platforms from year to year, like Max and iPhones and that kind of thing. But the post says that the company is no longer planning to release a new headset in twenty twenty five. So could it be that mixed reality is one arena in which Apple's reality distortion field just doesn't extend. So in the past I've predicted that various Apple products wouldn't go very far. I mean, the iPad is a really big example of one where I whiffed big time. So I've been so incredibly wrong in the past. But maybe the challenges of getting a broad audience for a mixed reality headset are too great even for Apple, and to be fear to the company, mixed reality is a very tough sell. I mean, the headsets are expensive. You know, you have to wear them on your head, so that's got a strike against it for a lot of people. And there's a very limited number of applications for these headsets right now. Despite the fact that what they do appears to be really incredible, it's a a very limited set of things that they do, so with all of these things taken into account, it's tough to get traction. So it's a pretty big uphill battle, and I don't think Apple's gonna win it. Tesla has had a wild week that I think proves the point that if we live inside a computer simulation, there's some serious bugs in the programming. So Tesla held its twenty twenty four Q one earnings call this week, and the company revealed that, at least according to The Verge, Tesla's net income is down nine percent year over year and has hit a six year low. Oh and quote, net income attributable to common stockholders has slid fifty five percent end quote. That's according to Andrew Hawkins of The Verge, and he attributes this both to Tesla's price cutting efforts and cooling demand for evs among the buying public. Elon Musk says the auto industry in general has pivoted from EV's back to hybrids, and that certainly is going on here in America. I mean, we have seen a few different auto manufacturers switch gears to use a pun and to favor hybrids over evs for at least the near term. The earnings call included a section that teased Tesla's upcoming robotaxi product, which we're told we're going to hear more about on August eighth. I'll remind you that, according to various states that have regulatory requirements for autonomous taxi services, Tesla has not yet begun the licensing procedures to get permission to operate such a service in those states. Now, maybe that's changed since the initial teas of the robotaxi service. Maybe Tesla has started to file that paperwork. I haven't heard that. But what happened after this earnings call is where things really went bonkers from me. So you had this earnings call, things sound dire. You know, you're down significantly from the previous year, and the stock price would surge twelve percent in trading on Wednesday. So I told you is a mad world out there. The stockholder enthusiasm appears to be linked to things like the upcoming robotaxi effort, Musk claiming that Tesla isn't so much an auto manufacturer as it is a digital platform, as well as Musk's announcement that the company plans to introduce new models early next year, if not sooner. I have no idea if any of that is realistic. Keep in mind, we're also talking about the same company that had delayed the launch of the cyber truck numerous times before it finally rolled off lots. But the shareholders seem happy for now. In other Muskie news, Elon's Ai company x Ai, because Elon Musk continues to be obsessed with the letter x is getting close to raising six billion with a B dollars in investments on evaluation of eighteen billion dollars. According to tech Crunch. Not that long ago, the numbers looked a lot different. It was more like an effort to raise three billion dollars with evaluation of fifteen billion. But various heavy hitting and groups charged forward to get a piece of the action, and Xai quickly tweaked those numbers. So it's kind of like running a lemonade stand. You know, you've been selling tall, frosty glasses of tangy lemonade for like twenty five cents, but then there's this great lemon blight that wipes out nearly all lemons except for the ones that you have. And it also coincides with like a massive heat wave, and you've got the market cornered on your sweet and sour zipper, so you hike the price to five bucks for a shot. Anyway, the sales pitch for XAI sounds like something from a science fiction film where we find out how the killer robots got their start. So, namely, Musk plans to leverage data from his various other companies to use as training information for the AI developed by XAI. So those businesses include stuff like x formerly known as Twitter, which is a stakeholder in XAI, SpaceX, Tesla, and even Neuralink that's the brain computer interface company that Musk has. So Musk's vision is a world in which all these other businesses are feeding his XAI with real world data and experience and thus accelerating that AI's learning patterns, and voila, we get miracle robots and such. I remain skeptical. Now, a quick hop away from Tesla will take us over to a story about Fisker, which is an electric vehicle auto company that, according to SFGate dot com, is now on the brink of collapse. Huh, I'm business on the brink. That would actually be a really good name for a podcast. Anyway, this week, Fisker filed with the SEC and revealed that the company is pretty much broke. Back in March, it was unable to make an interest payment. Now, granted, it was a whopper of an interest payment, it was eight point four million dollars. But the filing revealed that, you know, this company, Fisker is on borrowed time. So unless creditors give the company some serious slack or it hits some crazy financial windfall, the screw will need to file for bankruptcy within thirty days. The filing doesn't sugarcoat things either. Essentially, it says giving us more money is really risky because we haven't proven we're able to do what we need to do. But yeah, we've seen a few stories about startups attempting to establish a foothold in the auto industry. More often than not, it does not work out. Okay, we've got a lot more news stories to get through before we get to that. Let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. We're back and we're going to take a little stroll over to Meta Meta also held an earnings call this week, but investors were not nearly as charmed by the revelations as those who were following the Tesla announcements. The call began with talk about AI to no big surprise, and then Zuckerberg also talked about the metaverse, which is funny because you don't hear that term bandied about nearly as much these days. I think AI I largely displaced the metaverse concept that became like the new thing that business leaders got excited about. But as CNBC's Ashley Caput put said, quote, he spent almost the entirety of his opening remarks focused on the many ways Meta loses money end quote, Mizcaput, I believe you have spilt some tea all over the place. But yeah, Meta is very good at spending a lot of money on stuff that isn't making very much by comparison. So, for example, Reality Labs brought in four hundred and forty million dollars in sales, and that's a lot of cheddar, but that same division racked up a financial loss of three point eighty five billion dollars. Anyway, Zuckerberg also seemed prepared for the financial blow that would follow this earnings call because he acknowledged that investors are generally not very happy about Meta spending billions of dollars on projects that are not yet monetizable. Sure enough, in the wake of the earnings call, Meta's stock price dropped nineteen percent in extended trading at some points. As for the future, Zuckerberg revealed that the company estimates capital expenditures for twenty twenty four to be in the thirty five billion to forty billion dollar range. That's more than what the company had previously estimated, So I guess making the future is real expensive. Microsoft also had an earnings call this week, and the company explained that the absolute rush to develop AI has meant the demand for cloud based computing power is greater than the supply of resources. So the report showed that Microsoft has increased capital expenditures by nearly eighty percent year over year in an effort to meet this demand to build out things like data centers and such, and the company is going to have to spend even more in the next couple of years in order to really feed the hungry beast that is AI. This is kind of like seeing Parkinson's law of data on steroids, So Parkinson's law of data in case you don't know what that is, it says that information will fill any space made available to it, like it doesn't matter how big your library or filing cabinet or storage drive is, any way of having a way of retaining information, it will fill up. Like I remember when we would get a computer with a hard drive like one hundred and twenty eight megabytes or something, and I'd think, oh, we'll never fill all this up, which was ridiculous obviously, Well, this seems to be that same kind of issue. The compute power instead of storage power just will get swallowed up as soon as you make it available. Microsoft keeps adding to it, and customers in the form of companies running these AI implementations just buy it right up. But the expenditures that Microsoft is making in order to meet this demand so far are actually outpacing income. So that could be a sticky wicket. At some point you could meet a tipping point where it just you're spending more money than you could possibly bring back in, especially if some of these startup AI companies of fizzle out. So we'll have to see where this kind of levels out. I'm sure there will be a point, I don't know when that'll happen. Google is facing sanctions in South Korea after that nation's Fair Trade Commission, the Korea's version of FTC, determined that Google's practice of giving YouTube Premium subscribers access to YouTube Music as well essentially amounts to bundling these services together and is an anti competitive practice that has hurt domestic companies streaming platforms. So YouTube Music became the top music streaming service in the Korean market, it surpassed even the native Korean services, and the FTC launched an investigation into the matter last year and now is preparing to determine sanctions. But meanwhile, Korean companies are saying this is too little, too late, and that the whole determination process is just far too long to be of any good because by the time a decision has arrived at the damage has already been done. Meanwhile, the u US FTC, in our case, it's the Federal Trade Commission, ruled that companies are no longer allowed to force employees into non compete agreements. This applies across all industries, obviously, but inside the tech world it is a particularly huge development. Companies have long relied on non competes to prevent employees from jumping ship and working with a competitor, potentially bringing valuable skills and knowledge to that competitor. In fact, some of the podcasters you listen to may have non compete clauses in their work agreements, you know, like ones you might be listening to right now. But the FTC says that kind of thing is not going to fly anymore. And you, as you might imagine, that decision has not exactly been met with universal approval among corporations out there, including tech companies. So on the contrary, industry groups are already suing the FTC, arguing that the agency lacks the authority to make and enforce such a ruling. This rule will go into effect on August twenty second of this year, at which point all current non competes, at least for anyone who isn't in an executive policy making position and earning you know, more than one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, all non competes will be null and void, and companies will not be allowed to issue new ones. The lawsuits will continue until a final decision is made. My guess is that ultimately this is going to have to go all the way to the Supreme Court. That's going to take years. So in the meantime, I say, make hay while the sun shines. Okay, I got a couple of weird AI stories to get throughs. First up is a case in Maryland in which the athletic director for a high school was found to have used AI to impersonate the voice of that school's principle. So the accusation goes that this athletic director fabricated and audio recording using an AI copy of the principal's voice, and this recording included some really awful stuff like racist and antisemitic messaging. Apparently this all happened back in January when the principle informed the athletic director that his contract was not going to be renewed. There were various issues and problems with this particular staff member. The athletic director then fabricated the recording and posted it to social media, which prompted a viral response. It led to the principle being placed on leave. And now it's revealed that the whole thing was a fraud. And I'm sure we'll never hear of any other outlandish potentially criminal uses of AI in voice replication technology, he said sarcastically. The other weird AI story deals with Drake and it's about a disk track. And yes, I know how lame it is to hear me say the phrase disc track. I have not earned any place at all within rap or hip hop culture, but anyway, this particular track was aimed at Kendrick Lamar, and the track included a recording of an AI impersonation of Tupac Shakur, who, of course died at the age of twenty five. Way back in nineteen ninety six. Shaquur's estate issued a cease and desist order against Drake and threaten legal actions saying that the estate did not give permission for the use of Shakur's audio likeness on this track. Shakur wasn't the only artist who is replicated for the purposes of hyping up Drake and or dissing Lamar. Snoop Dogg was also copied by AI, and you know Snoop dog is very much alive. The issue really highlights the legal gaps that currently exist with regard to technology's ability to copy not just a specific work, but a person's voice or style. Those sorts of things aren't eligible for copyright. You cannot copyright a voice or a style. You have to have something that's set down in some sort of established format for it to be eligible for copyright. So in the absence of copyright protection, the best avenue for those who have been copied tends to relate to publicity rights, which doesn't really apply to most of us. It's really more of something that applies to notable people. But anyway, I'm sure we'll never hear of any other versions of this very problem due to AI sarcasm. Again in good space news, NASA was able to fix some issues with the Voyager one spacecraft, which is currently the human made object that is furthest from its home planet. Voyager is in interstellar space, and last year the spacecraft had a malfunction that prevented it from being able to send data back to Earth. So for months, engineers at NASA worked to fix this problem, and now Voyager can send at least some data relating to its health and operations back to US, and NASA hopes to get other operations online in the near future. The solution largely revolved around addressing operations to different sectors of the computer system's memory. That must have been hard, because we're not talking about a massive amount of space here. I mean there's a massive amount of outer space, sure, but not a massive amount of computer memory space. Voyager has long since completed its primary mission, which was, along with Voyager two, to observe the outer planets of our Solar system, and now it's giving us information on the nature of interstellar space, which is pretty darn cool. Okay, I've gotten article recommendation for y'all before I sign off. It's from torrent Freak. It was written by Andy Maxwell. It's titled us Know Your Customer proposal will put an end to anonymous cloud users, which is alarming. The piece explains the whole issue, including the reasons behind wanting to clamp down on anonymity in the first place, and how this could impact services such as VPNs and such. It's well worth your time. That's it for this week. I hope you're all well, and I'll 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.