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 on Friday, October eleventh, twenty twenty four, and this week marked a new stage in the ongoing battle between the United States Department of Justice and Google slash Alphabet, Alphabet being the parent company of Google. And this is overcharges of Google engaging in anti competitive practices, including how Google pays other companies such as Apple to feature Google Search as the default search tool on devices like iPhones. So the stage we are now entering into is the negotiation stage, as the DOJ has released proposed remedies to address what it sees as illegal activity. Previously the summer, a judge found that Google had been engaged in anti competitive practices. So this is the next step, right, what do we do about this now? On the DOJ's side, the proposed remedies range from a ban on Google being able to broker these kinds of deals in the first place, to going so far as to call for breaking up the company. Into smaller pieces. Google meanwhile, suggests that the DOJ should pound zand at least when it comes to stuff like calling for Google to break up or to quote Google's Lee and Mulholland quote, this case is about a set of search distribution contracts. Rather than focus on that, the government seems to be pursuing a sweeping agenda that will impact numerous industries and products with significant un intended consequences for consumers, businesses, and American competitiveness end quote, which makes it sound like Google's worried that all of that capitalism is going to collapse if the DOJ gets its way. Maybe I'm putting too many words in Google's proverbial mouth at that point, but anyway, a Casey Newton newsletter, and as I've always said, I have no connection to Casey, don't know him personally or anything, but his newsletter is fantastic. In his newsletter this week, he indicates that this is really the starting point that these two parties have when it comes to negotiating an actual remediation strategy with Google. You know, they got some time to do this. A judge isn't going to hear the actual case about proposed remedies until next April, and there won't be a ruling on the matter until next August. So you could see this as both sides taking one of those positions where they're asking for way more than they think they're going to end up getting, and they know that they're going to have to meet somewhere in between these two extremes. Plus, we actually do still have a presidential election as well as elections for the House and the Senate happening between now in April, and those could clearly have a big impact on how the government proceeds. I think we may see a change in how Google positions itself for the search market, but I doubt it's going to go as far as forcing Google to break up. We have seen cases where the government has come in and forced companies to break up. Those don't always take There was a famous one with Microsoft that ultimately got reversed, but I just don't see that happening here. Maybe it will, and maybe by this time next year we'll all be talking about how Google is going to get split asunder into different companies. I have my doubts about that, but we'll have to wait and see. Tesla held its long delayed cyber cab event this past week. It was called the We Robot Event. WE as inwa E, not WE Robot. Musk had previously teased this event earlier in the year, initially planning it for August, but that clearly didn't happen. As August approached, the date slipped and we got October instead, and the company showed off a lot of stuff at the Wei Robot event. Part of that was a Tesla transport vehicle dubbed the robo Van, but apparently it's pronounced reboven based upon how Musk said it. Anyway, according to Musk, the autonomous vehicle will be able to haul cargo or carry up to twenty passengers to solve for high density, which I mean, that's kind of what the hyper loop was supposed to do, especially like what the hyper loop in Las Vegas is supposed to do. These days, we just have Tesla's chauffeurs driving people around a fairly limited area of Las Vegas through underground tunnels, which I think isn't exactly the hyper loop that all of us were anticipating when Musk first mentioned it, But what do I know, Maybe that'll turn out to be actually a great idea in the long run, I've seen a lot of skeptical reports about how it doesn't actually solve for any meaningful problems. As for the cyber cab itself, tech crunches Rebecca Bellen described it as a quote smaller, sleeker, two seater cyber truck end quote. Musk claimed that the operation of the cybercab would be such as to bring the cost per mile traveled to be at around twenty cents according to US currency plus. He said the average person will be able to buy one of these things, with the projected vehicle cost coming in at under thirty thousand dollars. I think the vision is to have a citizen owned fleet of cybercabs, so you could essentially rent out your cab like it was an uber, but you don't have to drive the thing, so you're just passive generating income by using your car as a transportation vehicle for strangers. I don't know if that would actually work. Maybe it would, but I suspect you would need to do a lot of maintenance and cleaning and that that would start to eat into whatever profits you made. But what do I know. Musk also claimed the company would be engaged in quote unsupervised FSD in Texas and California next year. In the quote, that's really ambitious. You know, unsupervised FSD meaning fully autonomous driving where you don't have a safety driver there, or if you do, they're not actively trying to solve for the car's problems. I mean, unsupervised FSD does suggest a truly autonomous vehicle. I think that is pretty ambitious, particularly since Tesla vehicles and Tesla owners, let's be fair, have garnered a reputation for getting into dangerous situations while in autopilot or full self drive modes. We've all seen the stories of various accidents that have happened while Tesla vehicles in these modes have failed to recognize a dangerous situation and then gotten into really bad accidents, sometimes with tragic results. So it does seem pretty ambitious to me to suggest that next year there's going to be these unsupervised FSD sessions. But I don't know. Maybe they'll be under very controlled circumstances, which I could sort of understand, but when they'll I last covered all this earlier this year the state of California, the regulators there indicated they had not received paperwork from Tesla that would be necessary to conduct those kinds of operations within the state. Now that may have changed since then. I couldn't find anything about it when I did some cursorysearching, but I admit I didn't spend a whole lot of time looking for it. So I will do that because I'm curious to see if perhaps Tesla actually has secured the permissions necessary to be able to conduct these kinds of operations. And I'm sure a lot of other media outlets will follow up on that story as well, so perhaps I'll have more to say about this next week. Musk says he expects the Cybercab to go into production before twenty twenty seven. Now, on top of the cabs and the Van, Musk also showed off the company's humanoid robot, dubbed Optimus. According to one article I read, robots at this event were serving as bartenders as well as dancers, and according to Bellin's piece and tech Crunch, the projected cost of one of these things is somewhere between twenty and thirty thousand dollars, so it's not exactly something the average person is going to be able to splurge on I imagine, But then keep in mind Elon Musk is frequently in the running for richest person in the world, so to him twenty or thirty thousand dollars isn't the same as it would be for I don't know anybody else. Now, the event has only happened since, you know, yesterday it was it was on Thursday when the event was held. However, there are already pieces about how investors are disappointed in the event. Most of the reports I saw said that investors felt like it didn't focus enough on the business side of things and instead came across as just sort of a marketing event. And as I said, Musk already has a reputation for talking a big game but then failing to follow through. I mean, he's been talking about fully autonomous vehicles being a thing since twenty sixteen at least, and it's always just been like a year or two in the future, and those years come and go and we're still not there yet, So maybe that's contributing to this. In pre market trading, the share price fell around six percent for Tesla, but that could just be a momentary blip. In fact, by the time you listen to this episode. It could be that the market has completely changed around. I don't know, but you know, he could take a quick surgency. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, I've got more tech news to cover. We're back. I got a couple of AI related stories to talk about this week. First up, Hayden Field of CNBC reported on how OpenAI warns that quote bad actors are using its platform to disrupt elections, but with little viral engagement end quotes. So, in other words, the fear that people would turn to AI in order to manufacture misinformation appears to be well founded. That is what is happening. But apparently, while there are people who are using AI to generate misinformation, that misinformation isn't getting very much traction. So in a pretty long report, open ai said it has detected and intervened in more than twenty misinformation campaigns that were using open AI's products like chat GPT. These campaigns included stuff like, you know, social media posts that were made by bots that were asked to create ultimately malicious posts to AIG generated web content designed to push specific narratives in an effort to shape perception and support, and it sounds as though the use of this AI for this kind of purpose it's on the rise, and that's no big surprise, especially now that the United States is about to hold an election. There's a lot of stake in the game if open ai is to be believed. However, the good news that we can take away from all this is that the AI generated stuff isn't getting any you know, viral attention. Now, if that is true, that's great, but we have to remember that the whole goal of generative AI projects is to get to a point where the stuff that AI is generating is as good, if not better, than the stuff that humans make. So at best, you could say this is really more of a slam against open AI's tools, saying they're not good enough to create viral posts like that's a message that I think open ai needs to be aware of because if they're saying, hey, yeah, sure people are using this to create misinformation, but here's the good news, it's not really effective, then you could say, well, does that mean that your tools can't make effective persuasive messaging? Because if that's the case, why would I use it in order to I don't know, design a marketing campaign for my product. That's tricky, right, because if you say no, no, no, it's good for that, then okay, well why is it not good at creating misinformation? Or are you just trying to be all things to all people while avoiding as much responsibility as possible. I don't know the answers to any of that. I just think it's interesting. Meanwhile, The Guardian's Ben Macouch reports that Russian campaigns are using AI generated images to spread disinformation about hurricanes Helene and Milton, which just recently impacted the southeastern United States. For example, an account on x the app formerly known as Twitter, posted images of a supposed flooded Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World in Florida. Now, any real Disney Parks fan knows the Magic Kingdom is actually built on the second story, or, if you're from Europe, the first floor, because there's actually a series of corridors known as the Utila Doors that are underneath areas like Main Street USA. So if you had really significant flooding, I'm talking like the stuff so deep that you're having to wade through it, that would be a heck of a thing. In the Magic Kingdom, it would probably mean those utilid doors would have to be almost totally flooded, which would be absolutely disastrous. Anyway, the images were actually created by AI, which many on x pointed out, and ex itself relatively quickly acknowledged it by tagging the posts saying that the images were AI generated. And there's been a lot of misinformation surrounding the hurricane season in the United States this year, and it appears that Russia is trying to stir the pot further with attempts like these, which you could argue are fairly feeble, like they're not really effective. But I think the philosophy of the Kremlin is if there's already fire, pour some gasoline on it. As we get closer to a deadline imposed by the United States government on Byteedance, the parent company of TikTok, and that deadline is that byte Dance must divest itself of TikTok in January or face a nationwide ban on the app here in the United States. ByteDance has reportedly started to cut staff by the hundreds. Now, this plan, according to Reuters, is to lean more heavily on artificial intelligence for the purposes of moderating content Reuter's reports that according to TikTok, around five hundred positions were cut in Malaysia. Other sources told Reuters that was closer to seven hundred positions. But yeah, another case of AI cutting into the jobs of human beings, in this case content moderation, which is already a pretty sensitive topic, right because there's a lot of concern that platforms in general, not just TikTok, but kind of across the web are not doing a good enough job when it comes to moderating content, doing things like protecting from harmful content to misinformation. TikTok is also in the new here in the United States because, after an investigation spanning more than two years, legal documents that were supposed to be sealed that are connected to a lawsuit that alleged TikTok has engaged in practices that put young people at risk in various ways. Those documents now reveal the company had its own internal investigations that seemed to support those allegations. That is, TikTok had conducted research on issues relating to child safety and found that indeed the company's practices were likely causing unhealthy consequences for younger users and you know, they ended up doing that stuff anyway. So this is kind of like the whistleblower situation over at Facebook now known as Meta, in which internal documents showed that at least some people within the company were really concerned about how products could affect users, but the company at large seemed to dismiss those concerns, and PR reports that the details in these documents were intended to be redacted, but that an error in publication meant that large portion of the documents were not redacted, and before the court could remedy that, the Kentucky Public Radio published some of that material. That's where it was revealed that executives within TikTok were aware of potentially harmful practices and how some remediation strategies were really nothing more than lip service, and yet the company promoted these features as being a meaningful way to address concerns like time management type features, right, the idea of let's try and alert people so that they limit their time on the app. According to the documents, it shows that people within TikTok realized this wasn't actually discouraging people from using the app as much. They still were using the app a lot, but it did give TikTok a little bit of smoke screen to make it look like the company was doing something about an issue that was concerning a lot of folks. I actually really recommend reading nbr's full piece on this story. They go into a lot more detail. The story is titled States probed TikTok for Years. Here are the documents the app tried to keep secret, and you can find that on NPR dot org. It originally published earlier this morning, Friday, October eleventh, twenty twenty four. Chinese based hackers are said to have successfully penetrated networks belonging to US Internet service providers, including Verizon and AT and T. And they did it by targeting backdoor surveillance systems that are meant to allow US agencies, you know, like the FBI or the NSA a way to conduct surveillance across these networks. And it's almost like an entire population of people, including myself, have pointed out repeatedly that intentionally creating workarounds to secure systems means you've turned them into inherently insecure systems. Right. I use an analogy. I say, imagine you've got a bank vault and you've got the world's most sophisticated, powerful vault door that cannot be breached. It is incredibly secure. But you've also put a screen door in the back of the vault so that the FEDS can sometimes just pop in and out just to make sure everything's okay. Well, if the thieves know that there's a back door, you know they're gonna dedicate their time to finding the back door and using that rather than go through the front, because going through the front would require way too much time and resources. Just find the way through the back. It's already there, you can just use that. That seems to be what happened. So Chinese hackers being called Salt Typhoon have apparently done this and were able to access the various ISPs potentially for months before they were detected and they were able to be addressed. So yeah, that's a real issue. As to how bad that hack was hard to say at the moment. There's still investigations that are ongoing, but it's not like this was some crazy unforeseen outcome. People have been warning for years that these intentional back doors are a bad idea. Okay, the one bit of news I missed last week that I wanted to mention just to wrap this up, is that Microsoft last week announced it had discontinued the HoloLens augmented reality headset. It's no longer producing new units, and it plans to in support for existing devices by December twenty twenty seven. So the hollow Lens launched in twenty sixteen, there have been some preview events the year before, and it was never a consumer product. Microsoft marketed it more as an enterprise product for businesses. The company released an updated model in twenty nineteen. The headsets cost around three thousand to three five hundred dollars, so they weren't cheap, and it looks like Meta is going to be the one charging ahead with its own AR headset development, while Microsoft and potentially Apple take a step back from attempting to augment reality. That's it for the news this week. I hope all of you out there are doing 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. 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 on Friday, October eleventh, twenty twenty four, and this week marked a new stage in the ongoing battle between the United States Department of Justice and Google slash Alphabet, Alphabet being the parent company of Google. And this is overcharges of Google engaging in anti competitive practices, including how Google pays other companies such as Apple to feature Google Search as the default search tool on devices like iPhones. So the stage we are now entering into is the negotiation stage, as the DOJ has released proposed remedies to address what it sees as illegal activity. Previously the summer, a judge found that Google had been engaged in anti competitive practices. So this is the next step, right, what do we do about this now? On the DOJ's side, the proposed remedies range from a ban on Google being able to broker these kinds of deals in the first place, to going so far as to call for breaking up the company. Into smaller pieces. Google meanwhile, suggests that the DOJ should pound zand at least when it comes to stuff like calling for Google to break up or to quote Google's Lee and Mulholland quote, this case is about a set of search distribution contracts. Rather than focus on that, the government seems to be pursuing a sweeping agenda that will impact numerous industries and products with significant un intended consequences for consumers, businesses, and American competitiveness end quote, which makes it sound like Google's worried that all of that capitalism is going to collapse if the DOJ gets its way. Maybe I'm putting too many words in Google's proverbial mouth at that point, but anyway, a Casey Newton newsletter, and as I've always said, I have no connection to Casey, don't know him personally or anything, but his newsletter is fantastic. In his newsletter this week, he indicates that this is really the starting point that these two parties have when it comes to negotiating an actual remediation strategy with Google. You know, they got some time to do this. A judge isn't going to hear the actual case about proposed remedies until next April, and there won't be a ruling on the matter until next August. So you could see this as both sides taking one of those positions where they're asking for way more than they think they're going to end up getting, and they know that they're going to have to meet somewhere in between these two extremes. Plus, we actually do still have a presidential election as well as elections for the House and the Senate happening between now in April, and those could clearly have a big impact on how the government proceeds. I think we may see a change in how Google positions itself for the search market, but I doubt it's going to go as far as forcing Google to break up. We have seen cases where the government has come in and forced companies to break up. Those don't always take There was a famous one with Microsoft that ultimately got reversed, but I just don't see that happening here. Maybe it will, and maybe by this time next year we'll all be talking about how Google is going to get split asunder into different companies. I have my doubts about that, but we'll have to wait and see. Tesla held its long delayed cyber cab event this past week. It was called the We Robot Event. WE as inwa E, not WE Robot. Musk had previously teased this event earlier in the year, initially planning it for August, but that clearly didn't happen. As August approached, the date slipped and we got October instead, and the company showed off a lot of stuff at the Wei Robot event. Part of that was a Tesla transport vehicle dubbed the robo Van, but apparently it's pronounced reboven based upon how Musk said it. Anyway, according to Musk, the autonomous vehicle will be able to haul cargo or carry up to twenty passengers to solve for high density, which I mean, that's kind of what the hyper loop was supposed to do, especially like what the hyper loop in Las Vegas is supposed to do. These days, we just have Tesla's chauffeurs driving people around a fairly limited area of Las Vegas through underground tunnels, which I think isn't exactly the hyper loop that all of us were anticipating when Musk first mentioned it, But what do I know, Maybe that'll turn out to be actually a great idea in the long run, I've seen a lot of skeptical reports about how it doesn't actually solve for any meaningful problems. As for the cyber cab itself, tech crunches Rebecca Bellen described it as a quote smaller, sleeker, two seater cyber truck end quote. Musk claimed that the operation of the cybercab would be such as to bring the cost per mile traveled to be at around twenty cents according to US currency plus. He said the average person will be able to buy one of these things, with the projected vehicle cost coming in at under thirty thousand dollars. I think the vision is to have a citizen owned fleet of cybercabs, so you could essentially rent out your cab like it was an uber, but you don't have to drive the thing, so you're just passive generating income by using your car as a transportation vehicle for strangers. I don't know if that would actually work. Maybe it would, but I suspect you would need to do a lot of maintenance and cleaning and that that would start to eat into whatever profits you made. But what do I know. Musk also claimed the company would be engaged in quote unsupervised FSD in Texas and California next year. In the quote, that's really ambitious. You know, unsupervised FSD meaning fully autonomous driving where you don't have a safety driver there, or if you do, they're not actively trying to solve for the car's problems. I mean, unsupervised FSD does suggest a truly autonomous vehicle. I think that is pretty ambitious, particularly since Tesla vehicles and Tesla owners, let's be fair, have garnered a reputation for getting into dangerous situations while in autopilot or full self drive modes. We've all seen the stories of various accidents that have happened while Tesla vehicles in these modes have failed to recognize a dangerous situation and then gotten into really bad accidents, sometimes with tragic results. So it does seem pretty ambitious to me to suggest that next year there's going to be these unsupervised FSD sessions. But I don't know. Maybe they'll be under very controlled circumstances, which I could sort of understand, but when they'll I last covered all this earlier this year the state of California, the regulators there indicated they had not received paperwork from Tesla that would be necessary to conduct those kinds of operations within the state. Now that may have changed since then. I couldn't find anything about it when I did some cursorysearching, but I admit I didn't spend a whole lot of time looking for it. So I will do that because I'm curious to see if perhaps Tesla actually has secured the permissions necessary to be able to conduct these kinds of operations. And I'm sure a lot of other media outlets will follow up on that story as well, so perhaps I'll have more to say about this next week. Musk says he expects the Cybercab to go into production before twenty twenty seven. Now, on top of the cabs and the Van, Musk also showed off the company's humanoid robot, dubbed Optimus. According to one article I read, robots at this event were serving as bartenders as well as dancers, and according to Bellin's piece and tech Crunch, the projected cost of one of these things is somewhere between twenty and thirty thousand dollars, so it's not exactly something the average person is going to be able to splurge on I imagine, But then keep in mind Elon Musk is frequently in the running for richest person in the world, so to him twenty or thirty thousand dollars isn't the same as it would be for I don't know anybody else. Now, the event has only happened since, you know, yesterday it was it was on Thursday when the event was held. However, there are already pieces about how investors are disappointed in the event. Most of the reports I saw said that investors felt like it didn't focus enough on the business side of things and instead came across as just sort of a marketing event. And as I said, Musk already has a reputation for talking a big game but then failing to follow through. I mean, he's been talking about fully autonomous vehicles being a thing since twenty sixteen at least, and it's always just been like a year or two in the future, and those years come and go and we're still not there yet, So maybe that's contributing to this. In pre market trading, the share price fell around six percent for Tesla, but that could just be a momentary blip. In fact, by the time you listen to this episode. It could be that the market has completely changed around. I don't know, but you know, he could take a quick surgency. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, I've got more tech news to cover. We're back. I got a couple of AI related stories to talk about this week. First up, Hayden Field of CNBC reported on how OpenAI warns that quote bad actors are using its platform to disrupt elections, but with little viral engagement end quotes. So, in other words, the fear that people would turn to AI in order to manufacture misinformation appears to be well founded. That is what is happening. But apparently, while there are people who are using AI to generate misinformation, that misinformation isn't getting very much traction. So in a pretty long report, open ai said it has detected and intervened in more than twenty misinformation campaigns that were using open AI's products like chat GPT. These campaigns included stuff like, you know, social media posts that were made by bots that were asked to create ultimately malicious posts to AIG generated web content designed to push specific narratives in an effort to shape perception and support, and it sounds as though the use of this AI for this kind of purpose it's on the rise, and that's no big surprise, especially now that the United States is about to hold an election. There's a lot of stake in the game if open ai is to be believed. However, the good news that we can take away from all this is that the AI generated stuff isn't getting any you know, viral attention. Now, if that is true, that's great, but we have to remember that the whole goal of generative AI projects is to get to a point where the stuff that AI is generating is as good, if not better, than the stuff that humans make. So at best, you could say this is really more of a slam against open AI's tools, saying they're not good enough to create viral posts like that's a message that I think open ai needs to be aware of because if they're saying, hey, yeah, sure people are using this to create misinformation, but here's the good news, it's not really effective, then you could say, well, does that mean that your tools can't make effective persuasive messaging? Because if that's the case, why would I use it in order to I don't know, design a marketing campaign for my product. That's tricky, right, because if you say no, no, no, it's good for that, then okay, well why is it not good at creating misinformation? Or are you just trying to be all things to all people while avoiding as much responsibility as possible. I don't know the answers to any of that. I just think it's interesting. Meanwhile, The Guardian's Ben Macouch reports that Russian campaigns are using AI generated images to spread disinformation about hurricanes Helene and Milton, which just recently impacted the southeastern United States. For example, an account on x the app formerly known as Twitter, posted images of a supposed flooded Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World in Florida. Now, any real Disney Parks fan knows the Magic Kingdom is actually built on the second story, or, if you're from Europe, the first floor, because there's actually a series of corridors known as the Utila Doors that are underneath areas like Main Street USA. So if you had really significant flooding, I'm talking like the stuff so deep that you're having to wade through it, that would be a heck of a thing. In the Magic Kingdom, it would probably mean those utilid doors would have to be almost totally flooded, which would be absolutely disastrous. Anyway, the images were actually created by AI, which many on x pointed out, and ex itself relatively quickly acknowledged it by tagging the posts saying that the images were AI generated. And there's been a lot of misinformation surrounding the hurricane season in the United States this year, and it appears that Russia is trying to stir the pot further with attempts like these, which you could argue are fairly feeble, like they're not really effective. But I think the philosophy of the Kremlin is if there's already fire, pour some gasoline on it. As we get closer to a deadline imposed by the United States government on Byteedance, the parent company of TikTok, and that deadline is that byte Dance must divest itself of TikTok in January or face a nationwide ban on the app here in the United States. ByteDance has reportedly started to cut staff by the hundreds. Now, this plan, according to Reuters, is to lean more heavily on artificial intelligence for the purposes of moderating content Reuter's reports that according to TikTok, around five hundred positions were cut in Malaysia. Other sources told Reuters that was closer to seven hundred positions. But yeah, another case of AI cutting into the jobs of human beings, in this case content moderation, which is already a pretty sensitive topic, right because there's a lot of concern that platforms in general, not just TikTok, but kind of across the web are not doing a good enough job when it comes to moderating content, doing things like protecting from harmful content to misinformation. TikTok is also in the new here in the United States because, after an investigation spanning more than two years, legal documents that were supposed to be sealed that are connected to a lawsuit that alleged TikTok has engaged in practices that put young people at risk in various ways. Those documents now reveal the company had its own internal investigations that seemed to support those allegations. That is, TikTok had conducted research on issues relating to child safety and found that indeed the company's practices were likely causing unhealthy consequences for younger users and you know, they ended up doing that stuff anyway. So this is kind of like the whistleblower situation over at Facebook now known as Meta, in which internal documents showed that at least some people within the company were really concerned about how products could affect users, but the company at large seemed to dismiss those concerns, and PR reports that the details in these documents were intended to be redacted, but that an error in publication meant that large portion of the documents were not redacted, and before the court could remedy that, the Kentucky Public Radio published some of that material. That's where it was revealed that executives within TikTok were aware of potentially harmful practices and how some remediation strategies were really nothing more than lip service, and yet the company promoted these features as being a meaningful way to address concerns like time management type features, right, the idea of let's try and alert people so that they limit their time on the app. According to the documents, it shows that people within TikTok realized this wasn't actually discouraging people from using the app as much. They still were using the app a lot, but it did give TikTok a little bit of smoke screen to make it look like the company was doing something about an issue that was concerning a lot of folks. I actually really recommend reading nbr's full piece on this story. They go into a lot more detail. The story is titled States probed TikTok for Years. Here are the documents the app tried to keep secret, and you can find that on NPR dot org. It originally published earlier this morning, Friday, October eleventh, twenty twenty four. Chinese based hackers are said to have successfully penetrated networks belonging to US Internet service providers, including Verizon and AT and T. And they did it by targeting backdoor surveillance systems that are meant to allow US agencies, you know, like the FBI or the NSA a way to conduct surveillance across these networks. And it's almost like an entire population of people, including myself, have pointed out repeatedly that intentionally creating workarounds to secure systems means you've turned them into inherently insecure systems. Right. I use an analogy. I say, imagine you've got a bank vault and you've got the world's most sophisticated, powerful vault door that cannot be breached. It is incredibly secure. But you've also put a screen door in the back of the vault so that the FEDS can sometimes just pop in and out just to make sure everything's okay. Well, if the thieves know that there's a back door, you know they're gonna dedicate their time to finding the back door and using that rather than go through the front, because going through the front would require way too much time and resources. Just find the way through the back. It's already there, you can just use that. That seems to be what happened. So Chinese hackers being called Salt Typhoon have apparently done this and were able to access the various ISPs potentially for months before they were detected and they were able to be addressed. So yeah, that's a real issue. As to how bad that hack was hard to say at the moment. There's still investigations that are ongoing, but it's not like this was some crazy unforeseen outcome. People have been warning for years that these intentional back doors are a bad idea. Okay, the one bit of news I missed last week that I wanted to mention just to wrap this up, is that Microsoft last week announced it had discontinued the HoloLens augmented reality headset. It's no longer producing new units, and it plans to in support for existing devices by December twenty twenty seven. So the hollow Lens launched in twenty sixteen, there have been some preview events the year before, and it was never a consumer product. Microsoft marketed it more as an enterprise product for businesses. The company released an updated model in twenty nineteen. The headsets cost around three thousand to three five hundred dollars, so they weren't cheap, and it looks like Meta is going to be the one charging ahead with its own AR headset development, while Microsoft and potentially Apple take a step back from attempting to augment reality. That's it for the news this week. I hope all of you out there are doing 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.