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. It's time for the tech news for Tuesday, April twenty fifth, twenty twenty three. Last week, I talked about how the SpaceX Starship launch was a success despite the fact that the ding dang darn thing sploded all over the Gulf of Mexico. As a reminder, this was a test launch of the world's most powerful launch vehicle ever and had no crew aboard it, thank goodness, and the purpose was just to get the launch vehicle off the ground without destroying the launch tower in the process. While there was a hope that the starship would actually be able to achieve orbit, that was a secondary goal. So when there was an engine failure and a failure for the first stage to separate from the second and then the ship began to spin in the air, SpaceX chose to toggle a self destruct switch so that the starship would detonate safely over the Gulf and not go flying off somewhere. Since then, we've learned that there was extensive damage to the launch pad itself during the launch, while the tower remained standing. There are craters in debris across the launch area, and it may be weeks or maybe months before the launch pad is ready for another launch. It will take some extensive repairs, and in the meantime, Elon Musk has indicated that SpaceX may make some changes to the launchpad to give it a better chance of holding up to the incredible heat and force generated by the thirty three rocket engines of the Starship's first stage. This actually isn't dissimilar to issues NASA has encountered with their Space Launch System, which has about half the thrust power of the Starship. The SLS has also damaged lawn bunch facilities during operations. It turns out when you play with really big rockets, you can sometimes end up with a real big hole in the ground. Now, let's talk about Twitter. So last week the platform pulled the trigger on a promise it had been making for a while. Folks who had a verified check mark but who were not subscribed to Twitter blue saw those check marks go bye bye, which includes yours truly, my check mark went away, and Elon Musk, ever the mature businessman comped certain celebrities and gave them their check marks. These were mainly celebrities who had been criticizing the move to turn the verification system into a paid perk as opposed to, you know, a means of actually verifying a user's identity. And the blue check mark implies, or actually, heck it outright says it, if you were to hover your mouse over the check mark, that the person who has the check mark had paid for that privilege, even though in the case of folks like the famous author Stephen King, that wasn't the case. He had not paid the Twitter subscription. The check mark returned because Elon Musk, I guess wanted to rub it in Stephen King's face because King had been criticizing the whole paid for check mark thing in the first place, and now it makes it seem like Stephen King had paid for it, makes him seem like he's a hypocrite, when in fact he didn't pay for this. So yeah, there's been a lot of trash talking about Twitter turning the check mark into a revenue generating scheme, and that you know, now these critics have been branded with that check mark as opposed to the check mark being a verification, and Musk then expanded his generosity because Twitter accounts with more than a million followers began to see their check marks returned, even though they hadn't asked for it. I remember seeing a tweet from author Neil Gaiman who expressed curiosity about this. He went so far as to point out that he had not subscribed to Twitter Blue, and yet his check mark had returned. And now that check mark is sort of viewed as a badge of dishonor like. The implication is that people who have a check are desperate for recognition and have paid for it. So even people who did subscribe to Twitter Blue, some of them are now trying to dump it in order to get rid of that check mark, because they don't want to be associated with a perception that they're paying to be recognized. It's actually a pretty fascinating situation. Something that was once viewed as a kind of status symbol and something to be desired is now looked at as almost being taboo. And I think there's a possible sociology dissertation in there somewhere, and you're welcome, grad students. By the way, this gets even more confusing because Twitter accounts that belong to people who are no longer with us, people who have died. Over the past few years, they've seen their check marks return, and again, if you hover your mouth over the check mark, it says that the person who owns that account is paying for a Twitter Blue subscription, which you know, raises questions as to how dead people were able to do that. So again, not like the smoothest transition. A real shock when you think about how Twitter has laid off seven thousand of their employees over the last several months. On a related note, some folks on Twitter are asking if perhaps these check marks represent false advertising in a way. So Twitter user drill Dril brought this question up, asking if maybe this falls under the umbrella of a false endorsement. So the argument kind of goes like this. The check mark claims that the person whose name is in front of that check has paid for this service. But as we've seen, many, maybe even most, of the celebrities who currently have a check mark didn't actually pay for it, So that could imply that this celebrity is approving of the service right because the claim is that they paid for it, even if they haven't Twitter is saying they did. And so you see a celebrity's name, you see that check mark after it, You see the check mark claiming that the person with the check mark has paid for a subscription. That seems like the celebrity is endorsing the service, like they're saying, this is cool, That's why I bought it, And that could be seen as an endorsement, even though the celebrities have not done that. They haven't made any kind of deal with Twitter. There's no endorsing going on. It's against their will, right, even if they don't really care one way or another. They didn't seek it out. So when you view it that way, it does sound like Twitter. It could be violating some rules here with various high profile accounts pulled in by association. However, it's not a cut and dry case, so to be seen as actually being illegal, this matter would have to be framed as a type of advertisement, like it's an advertisement of Twitter Blue subscriptions. That's what the laws cover fair practices and advertising. But if you could frame it as not being an advertising issue, if it's in a different context, well you don't have that same legal foundation to support your argument. So it may never go any further than this. You know, we may not see anyone ever bring legal action against Twitter for forcing a check mark on people who don't want it, but it raises some really weird questions that I didn't think I would ever be asking. And one last Twitter piece for today before we move on to other news. Keith Berghart, a computer scientist at the Information Sciences Institute, has shared results from a research project that looks at hate speech on Twitter. So Burghart and his research team created a methodology to identify and quantify hate speech on Twitter. Essentially, the team identified about four dozen keywords closely associated with hate speech. I didn't dare look at the list because I have a feeling it would just make me sick. But they use these keywords as the starting point. They started to search for tweets that contain these keywords, but then they fed those tweets to a tool called Perspective API. This tool tries to identify examples of hate speech, and it differentiates between hate speech and something that's not hate speech. So, for example, you might have a tweet that is discussing hate speech, but it is not actually an example of hate speech. You would want to separate that out. Or you might have a tweet that's meant perhaps in a sexual context, but not a hateful one. You'd want to separate that out too, So they use this tool. They filtered through the results and then they compared the amount of hate speech present on Twitter before us took control of the company late last year, and how things are going now that he's in charge. And the findings are likely confirming your guesses. Incidents increased after Musk took control, both in the number of hateful keywords appearing in individual tweets, so more of these keywords are cropping up now, and also how frequently hateful users are tweeting out hate speech, So the number of times that people are tweeting out these things has increased. In fact, it was close to twice as much as it was before Musk took over. Now, I should also add hate speech has always been a problem on Twitter. This is not unique to Musk taking over the company. It was present before he ever started to express any interest in buying Twitter. And also, we haven't even had a full year's worth of data since Musk took over, right, we had a year has not passed, so we have a pretty small all sample size of data. We should keep that in mind too. This might not be a trend. It might be a spike, and it could be that over time the spike levels out. Again, we don't know yet, so I don't want anyone to jump to conclusions just to say, all right, well, Twitter is now a haven for hate and it will be like that forever. We don't know that. We do know that the incidents have definitely increased since Musk took over, but that's as far as we can go. News like this is not good good for Twitter obviously. It's still trying to attract advertisers back to the platform, and when you see a report like this, that's a that's not a big selling point. Okay, we've got a lot more news to cover before we get into any more. Let's take a quick break. We're back. Snapchat launched it's My Ai feature last week to users around the world. So before that, the feature was only available to Snapchat users who had enrolled in a subscription service, so it was a subscriber only feature until last week. Now, the reception of the feature has been pretty mixed, with the most vocal users going the old review bombing route and giving the Snapchat app a terrible review. According to tech Crunch, users hit the Snapchat app with an average of one point sixty seven stars out of five. Seventy five percent of all reviews last week were one star. That is brutal. The chief reason cited for these low reviews was the incorporation of the AI chatbot. As it stands, the AI feature is pinned to the top of the app's chat feature. Users who are critical of this inclusion wanted a way to turn it off or opt out of the feature, and currently there's not a way to do that. Criticisms ranged from this is lame to this is creepy. One alleged exchange between the AI and a user named Brittany made the rounds on Twitter. Some screenshots showed that Brittany asked the AI tool to point her in the direction of the closest gas station, So the AI suggested a gas station that was about five miles away from her, and then Brittany followed that up by asking how did the AI know where she was? The AI essentially said, I don't know where you are, but Snapchat may have access to your location. Well, Brittany then says, well, how is that possible because I chose to have snapchat hidden from maps, it shouldn't know my location. Then the AI said, oh, I don't have access to your location. I can't tell you where the closest gas station is actually, And Brittany said, but you kind of already did that. So now I cannot say for sure that this exchange was legitimate. The screenshots could be faked, they could be photoshopped or something. But I have seen similar issues with other AI chatbots out there, chatbots who seem to unwittingly reveal that their creators know way more about us than they let on, including things where you ask a chatbot, hey, where am I right now? And the chatbot says, oh, I don't know where you are, so what's my location? I don't have that information. Okay, what's the closest gas station? And then it tells you, which obviously points out that somehow it did know your location, or at least the general location. It raises a lot of questions anyway. While I can't say for sure that Britney's exchange was real, though to be clear, I have no reason to doubt it either, I can say for sure that a lot of users have been vocal in their dislike of this new feature. That doesn't necessarily mean everyone hates it. Of course, it is possible that the vast majority of Snapchat users actually love AI. They're just being quiet about it, and the only people who are making a fuss are the ones who hate it. That's a possibility. While some music studios are attempting to use law so that they can stave off a wave of AI generated deep fake songs featuring recognizable voices signed to their labels, one musical artist is welcoming our robot overlords. That artist is Grimes. She has told her fans that she wants to see what AI collaborations can come up with. She said that she asks for a fifty percent split in royalties on quote any successful AI generated song that uses my voice end quote, that being her voice, not my voice. She said she is putting no boundaries on this. There are no legal bindings. She is not represented by a label, so there's no danger of a giant company swooping in and saying no, no, no, actually we own her voice, you can't have it. Grimes says she wants to see what can come of this, that she's willing to serve as a guinea pig, and if she can create a model where an artist receives compensation when someone else uses an AI generated version of that person's voice, it could really shake things up in the art world. I'm not saying that AI generated voices will totally replace the real McCoy, but I could also see some artists experiment with this, particularly if it means you can sit back and collect the checks while the robots do all the work. I am being a little facetious here because clearly this only works because Grimes already has done all the work. She has created art that people want to emulate in the first place, and without that, none of this works. An appeals court has issued a ruling regarding the ongoing struggles between Apple and Epic Games. The ruling upholds an earlier court's decision, which mostly finds in favor of Apple, with one big exception. So just as a reminder, this whole thing started when Epic Games, the publisher for Fortnite, encouraged players on Iowa US and Android devices, to use some workarounds for in game transactions that would go outside the InApp transaction services. That way, Epic Games would keep the full amount of the transaction rather than Apple, or in the case of Android devices, Google getting a thirty percent cut of every one of them. Apple brought down the meteor hammer on Epic Games, and a big legal fight has been going on ever since. Well. While this particular part of the legal battle has mostly found in favor of Apple, the one bit that helps developers like Epic Games out is that Apple has to allow links and buttons that go to third party in app payment options if that's what the developer wants. So Apple doesn't have to include these options by default, but if a developer wants to give users the chance to use some other transaction method, Apple isn't allowed to block that. Apple has said it disagrees with this ruling. No big surprise there, and the company has fourteen days to file an appeal to this decision. If they do appeal, then the case would then go to either a larger group of judges on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is where this last case was heard, or it would go straight to the US Supreme Court. Microsoft is backed down in the EU in an effort to sidestep a potential anti trust probe, kind of thematically tagging onto the back of the Apple story here. So in this case, at issue is Microsoft's practice of bundling Microsoft Teams with its Office suite of productivity software. So competitors like Slack have argued that Microsoft forcing Teams into Office bundles is an anti competitive practice that Microsoft is trying to muscle out competition from any other video conferencing or messaging services. This really isn't that different from when Microsoft faced similar complaints when it bundled its web browser, which was then Internet Exploited or with the Windows operating system, though that case was further complicated by how deeply integrated Internet Explorer was with Windows. It has long been a key element in Microsoft's strategy to bundle programs together in an effort to dominate a market. While users might prefer to go a la carte when it comes to picking and choosing productivity tools, Microsoft's approach has mostly been an all or nothing affair. Now, Microsoft says it will offer options for EU customers to purchase Office with or without Microsoft Teams, though how that's actually going to manifest remains to be seen. Also, that might not be enough to prevent an antitrust probe anyway, We'll just have to see what the regulators say. In twenty twenty one, Alphabet, Google's parent company began work on a truly massive project building out a mega campus in San Jose, California. Do you know the way to San Jose? And when I say a mega campus, I mean this thing was to be huge, like eighty acres in size. According to Ours Technica, the Finnish campus was to include offices, housing units, parks, hotels, restaurants, shops, theaters, museums, and more like. It sounded like a city within a city, just to say that happens to be, you know, owned and operated by Google. But now the company has hit pause on those plants, or perhaps even stop, while construction crews have already performed a wave of demolition work that now looks like it's just going to be in limbo. According to CNBC, that demolition work destroyed some landmarks in San Jose and forced others to relocate to other parts of the city. And now Google has nothing to go in those places. It's just bulldozed territory. And there's a real fear that these spots in San Jose will just remain un finished for the foreseeable future. Google, like most big tech companies, has been making some serious cost cutting moves recently, so it's not exactly a surprise that the company would back off on such an aggressive plan. In fact, one wonders what convinced Google executives to even pursue this idea back in twenty twenty one. That was a year after the pandemic had begun and the world had really kind of adjusted to a remote work situation, which makes it seem like a pretty weird time to say, Hey, no one's in the office, so let's build a whole lot more office space, like a truly enormous amount office space, And following rounds of layoffs at Google it measures like desk sharing procedures and offices, it really seems like office space isn't way up on the company's priorities. So the question remains what happens to all that property in San Jose. And I don't know the answer to that except to say, yuck, Okay, I've got a handful more stories to go through before we get to that. Let's take another quick break, okay. California's Senate Judiciary Committee is set to deliberate on a proposed bill that if passed, would let Californians opt to delete their personal information from a company's database if they wanted to. It's nicknamed the Delete Act, and it's likely to face some pretty stiff opposition from the tech space. As I'm sure you all know, a lot of money in tech comes from data. There are companies that exist solely to collect and sell data to other companies. And while the main focus is on advertising, there are a lot of other issues here, even if you don't have a problem with targeted ads themselves, namely, law enforcement agencies have been known to use this data when it's inconvenient to you know, secure a warrant to sue such information through proper channels. Why do that when you can just buy it? Or when someone has a personal acts to grind and they use this data to track down like a former boss or that ex romantic partner. We've seen instances of that as well. So the Act is proposing a solution in which companies are obligated to allow Californians the option to just remove themselves from that data picture. This is not the first time that progressive lawmakers in California have tried something like this, but as I said, resistance in the tech sector is high to such legislation, and I imagine the journey to get this bill passed will be a lot like a walk in moor door. It ain't simple. Reuter's reports that GM and Samsung are working together to build an electric vehicle battery manufacturing plant here in the United States. Now, you may know that one of the challenges the world faces as more countries pass mandates to switch from in turn combustion engine vehicles to electric vehicles is that right now we do not produce enough batteries to meet global demand. Well, it's going to take a few years for car companies to completely change over to manufacturing evs, and in the meantime, projects like this one aim to reduce some of the bottlenecks in the production line. Now, there will be other bottlenecks, such as just getting the raw materials necessary to make batteries, but GM and Samsung are taking steps to build out the infrastructure that's going to be necessary if this conversion to evs is to succeed. Also, it's interesting to see a partnership between a South Korean tech company and a Detroit based auto manufacturer. Speaking of GM, the company is also phasing out its Chevy Bolt EV and EUV models this year. This is a blow to the affordable EV market, as the Bolt was one of the least expensive electric vehicles available to consumers here in the United States. But the Bolt is built on top of technology that no longer competes with more recent innovations, and it doesn't look like Chevy has a replacement in mind for the Bolt, at least nothing that's meant to take out that spot in the market, the affordable EV market. Rather, the company is focusing more on vehicles like electric trucks and electric SUVs because that seems to be what customers want, so fare thee well Chevy Bolt. Chinese company net Ease, which had served as the Chinese distributor for Blizzard Games until early this year, is now suing Blizzard for around forty four million dollars. So here's the rundown. Net Ease and Blizzard were in negotiations to renew the licensing deal between the two of them, but the companies failed to come to agreeable terms, so Blizzard opted to just leave net E's behind, and in the process, Blizzard shut down their servers in China, which meant players in China could no longer access their Blizzard games. Neties says that Blizzard failed to make good on several contractual obligations, including a failure to bring certain announced games to market or to issue refunds to Chinese players. Blizzard, for its part, says the company has yet to be served with any legal papers regarding a lawsuit, So they're saying Netties is saying they're suing us, but we haven't received a lawsuit. Also, Blizzard still is not running games in China because the company hasn't found a replacement for Nettie's and Chinese law mandates that game companies from outside the country have to work through a Chinese company in order to sell games and services to citizens within China. Once upon a time, scalpers looking to sell PlayStation five consoles and insane markups were sitting pretty because there was a shortage of inventory. That meant that someone who wanted a PS five had very few options open to them. If they missed out on a chance to scoop up one of just a few units that became available on any given day, they were back to waiting for the next one, or they would have to give it to the temptation to buy one from a scalper at a crazy inflated price. But now Sony has produced more consoles, plus a lot of households that really wanted one now have one. And that means that today's scalpers are starting to find out they're just playing out of luck, and at times some of them have been reduced to selling consoles for less than retail price. And I know it is a sad day when predatory jerks are hoisted by their own petard. And it only took a couple of years to get there. Finally, it's an historic time for the Palo Alto Research Center aka Park PARC. Back in nineteen seventy, Xerox founded Park as an R and D lab, similar to famous tech labs like Bell Laboratories. The researchers at Park ex faed and invented new technologies, some of which would emerge to change the world. For example, the GUY, or graphical user interface, was really first implemented at Xerox Park. Then one day an enterprising fellow named Steve Jobs went for a tour of Park's facilities and saw a demonstration of the GUY, also of the computer mouse, which wasn't invented at Park but was heavily used there, and Steve Jobs got this bright idea to offer up something similar in a personal computer, and then we get the story of the Mac Well. Xerox is now saying farewell to Park, and to be clear, Parks spun off of Xerox to become an independent company in two thousand and two, but Park's keys have now been handed over to SRII International. That organization actually began in nineteen forty six as part of Stanford University, though the organization that would evolve into SRI International actually spun off from Stanford in nineteen seventy, the same year that Park was founded. Today, SRI International is a nonprofit scientific research institute, so it sounds like a pretty great match with Park. It'll be an organization dedicated to doing cutting edge research in science and technology, potentially creating new products along the way. Xerox is going to keep a preferred research agreement with the newly merged organization, kind of like a first rights sort of situation. It also will continue to hold many of the patents that were secured by Park prior to this handoff. But yeah, interesting times. I should probably do a full episode about Xerox Park. Now that this has happened, all right, that wraps up the news for today, Tuesday, April twenty fifth, twenty twenty three. I hope you are 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 iHeartRadio. And how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for Tuesday, April twenty fifth, twenty twenty three. Last week, I talked about how the SpaceX Starship launch was a success despite the fact that the ding dang darn thing sploded all over the Gulf of Mexico. As a reminder, this was a test launch of the world's most powerful launch vehicle ever and had no crew aboard it, thank goodness, and the purpose was just to get the launch vehicle off the ground without destroying the launch tower in the process. While there was a hope that the starship would actually be able to achieve orbit, that was a secondary goal. So when there was an engine failure and a failure for the first stage to separate from the second and then the ship began to spin in the air, SpaceX chose to toggle a self destruct switch so that the starship would detonate safely over the Gulf and not go flying off somewhere. Since then, we've learned that there was extensive damage to the launch pad itself during the launch, while the tower remained standing. There are craters in debris across the launch area, and it may be weeks or maybe months before the launch pad is ready for another launch. It will take some extensive repairs, and in the meantime, Elon Musk has indicated that SpaceX may make some changes to the launchpad to give it a better chance of holding up to the incredible heat and force generated by the thirty three rocket engines of the Starship's first stage. This actually isn't dissimilar to issues NASA has encountered with their Space Launch System, which has about half the thrust power of the Starship. The SLS has also damaged lawn bunch facilities during operations. It turns out when you play with really big rockets, you can sometimes end up with a real big hole in the ground. Now, let's talk about Twitter. So last week the platform pulled the trigger on a promise it had been making for a while. Folks who had a verified check mark but who were not subscribed to Twitter blue saw those check marks go bye bye, which includes yours truly, my check mark went away, and Elon Musk, ever the mature businessman comped certain celebrities and gave them their check marks. These were mainly celebrities who had been criticizing the move to turn the verification system into a paid perk as opposed to, you know, a means of actually verifying a user's identity. And the blue check mark implies, or actually, heck it outright says it, if you were to hover your mouse over the check mark, that the person who has the check mark had paid for that privilege, even though in the case of folks like the famous author Stephen King, that wasn't the case. He had not paid the Twitter subscription. The check mark returned because Elon Musk, I guess wanted to rub it in Stephen King's face because King had been criticizing the whole paid for check mark thing in the first place, and now it makes it seem like Stephen King had paid for it, makes him seem like he's a hypocrite, when in fact he didn't pay for this. So yeah, there's been a lot of trash talking about Twitter turning the check mark into a revenue generating scheme, and that you know, now these critics have been branded with that check mark as opposed to the check mark being a verification, and Musk then expanded his generosity because Twitter accounts with more than a million followers began to see their check marks returned, even though they hadn't asked for it. I remember seeing a tweet from author Neil Gaiman who expressed curiosity about this. He went so far as to point out that he had not subscribed to Twitter Blue, and yet his check mark had returned. And now that check mark is sort of viewed as a badge of dishonor like. The implication is that people who have a check are desperate for recognition and have paid for it. So even people who did subscribe to Twitter Blue, some of them are now trying to dump it in order to get rid of that check mark, because they don't want to be associated with a perception that they're paying to be recognized. It's actually a pretty fascinating situation. Something that was once viewed as a kind of status symbol and something to be desired is now looked at as almost being taboo. And I think there's a possible sociology dissertation in there somewhere, and you're welcome, grad students. By the way, this gets even more confusing because Twitter accounts that belong to people who are no longer with us, people who have died. Over the past few years, they've seen their check marks return, and again, if you hover your mouth over the check mark, it says that the person who owns that account is paying for a Twitter Blue subscription, which you know, raises questions as to how dead people were able to do that. So again, not like the smoothest transition. A real shock when you think about how Twitter has laid off seven thousand of their employees over the last several months. On a related note, some folks on Twitter are asking if perhaps these check marks represent false advertising in a way. So Twitter user drill Dril brought this question up, asking if maybe this falls under the umbrella of a false endorsement. So the argument kind of goes like this. The check mark claims that the person whose name is in front of that check has paid for this service. But as we've seen, many, maybe even most, of the celebrities who currently have a check mark didn't actually pay for it, So that could imply that this celebrity is approving of the service right because the claim is that they paid for it, even if they haven't Twitter is saying they did. And so you see a celebrity's name, you see that check mark after it, You see the check mark claiming that the person with the check mark has paid for a subscription. That seems like the celebrity is endorsing the service, like they're saying, this is cool, That's why I bought it, And that could be seen as an endorsement, even though the celebrities have not done that. They haven't made any kind of deal with Twitter. There's no endorsing going on. It's against their will, right, even if they don't really care one way or another. They didn't seek it out. So when you view it that way, it does sound like Twitter. It could be violating some rules here with various high profile accounts pulled in by association. However, it's not a cut and dry case, so to be seen as actually being illegal, this matter would have to be framed as a type of advertisement, like it's an advertisement of Twitter Blue subscriptions. That's what the laws cover fair practices and advertising. But if you could frame it as not being an advertising issue, if it's in a different context, well you don't have that same legal foundation to support your argument. So it may never go any further than this. You know, we may not see anyone ever bring legal action against Twitter for forcing a check mark on people who don't want it, but it raises some really weird questions that I didn't think I would ever be asking. And one last Twitter piece for today before we move on to other news. Keith Berghart, a computer scientist at the Information Sciences Institute, has shared results from a research project that looks at hate speech on Twitter. So Burghart and his research team created a methodology to identify and quantify hate speech on Twitter. Essentially, the team identified about four dozen keywords closely associated with hate speech. I didn't dare look at the list because I have a feeling it would just make me sick. But they use these keywords as the starting point. They started to search for tweets that contain these keywords, but then they fed those tweets to a tool called Perspective API. This tool tries to identify examples of hate speech, and it differentiates between hate speech and something that's not hate speech. So, for example, you might have a tweet that is discussing hate speech, but it is not actually an example of hate speech. You would want to separate that out. Or you might have a tweet that's meant perhaps in a sexual context, but not a hateful one. You'd want to separate that out too, So they use this tool. They filtered through the results and then they compared the amount of hate speech present on Twitter before us took control of the company late last year, and how things are going now that he's in charge. And the findings are likely confirming your guesses. Incidents increased after Musk took control, both in the number of hateful keywords appearing in individual tweets, so more of these keywords are cropping up now, and also how frequently hateful users are tweeting out hate speech, So the number of times that people are tweeting out these things has increased. In fact, it was close to twice as much as it was before Musk took over. Now, I should also add hate speech has always been a problem on Twitter. This is not unique to Musk taking over the company. It was present before he ever started to express any interest in buying Twitter. And also, we haven't even had a full year's worth of data since Musk took over, right, we had a year has not passed, so we have a pretty small all sample size of data. We should keep that in mind too. This might not be a trend. It might be a spike, and it could be that over time the spike levels out. Again, we don't know yet, so I don't want anyone to jump to conclusions just to say, all right, well, Twitter is now a haven for hate and it will be like that forever. We don't know that. We do know that the incidents have definitely increased since Musk took over, but that's as far as we can go. News like this is not good good for Twitter obviously. It's still trying to attract advertisers back to the platform, and when you see a report like this, that's a that's not a big selling point. Okay, we've got a lot more news to cover before we get into any more. Let's take a quick break. We're back. Snapchat launched it's My Ai feature last week to users around the world. So before that, the feature was only available to Snapchat users who had enrolled in a subscription service, so it was a subscriber only feature until last week. Now, the reception of the feature has been pretty mixed, with the most vocal users going the old review bombing route and giving the Snapchat app a terrible review. According to tech Crunch, users hit the Snapchat app with an average of one point sixty seven stars out of five. Seventy five percent of all reviews last week were one star. That is brutal. The chief reason cited for these low reviews was the incorporation of the AI chatbot. As it stands, the AI feature is pinned to the top of the app's chat feature. Users who are critical of this inclusion wanted a way to turn it off or opt out of the feature, and currently there's not a way to do that. Criticisms ranged from this is lame to this is creepy. One alleged exchange between the AI and a user named Brittany made the rounds on Twitter. Some screenshots showed that Brittany asked the AI tool to point her in the direction of the closest gas station, So the AI suggested a gas station that was about five miles away from her, and then Brittany followed that up by asking how did the AI know where she was? The AI essentially said, I don't know where you are, but Snapchat may have access to your location. Well, Brittany then says, well, how is that possible because I chose to have snapchat hidden from maps, it shouldn't know my location. Then the AI said, oh, I don't have access to your location. I can't tell you where the closest gas station is actually, And Brittany said, but you kind of already did that. So now I cannot say for sure that this exchange was legitimate. The screenshots could be faked, they could be photoshopped or something. But I have seen similar issues with other AI chatbots out there, chatbots who seem to unwittingly reveal that their creators know way more about us than they let on, including things where you ask a chatbot, hey, where am I right now? And the chatbot says, oh, I don't know where you are, so what's my location? I don't have that information. Okay, what's the closest gas station? And then it tells you, which obviously points out that somehow it did know your location, or at least the general location. It raises a lot of questions anyway. While I can't say for sure that Britney's exchange was real, though to be clear, I have no reason to doubt it either, I can say for sure that a lot of users have been vocal in their dislike of this new feature. That doesn't necessarily mean everyone hates it. Of course, it is possible that the vast majority of Snapchat users actually love AI. They're just being quiet about it, and the only people who are making a fuss are the ones who hate it. That's a possibility. While some music studios are attempting to use law so that they can stave off a wave of AI generated deep fake songs featuring recognizable voices signed to their labels, one musical artist is welcoming our robot overlords. That artist is Grimes. She has told her fans that she wants to see what AI collaborations can come up with. She said that she asks for a fifty percent split in royalties on quote any successful AI generated song that uses my voice end quote, that being her voice, not my voice. She said she is putting no boundaries on this. There are no legal bindings. She is not represented by a label, so there's no danger of a giant company swooping in and saying no, no, no, actually we own her voice, you can't have it. Grimes says she wants to see what can come of this, that she's willing to serve as a guinea pig, and if she can create a model where an artist receives compensation when someone else uses an AI generated version of that person's voice, it could really shake things up in the art world. I'm not saying that AI generated voices will totally replace the real McCoy, but I could also see some artists experiment with this, particularly if it means you can sit back and collect the checks while the robots do all the work. I am being a little facetious here because clearly this only works because Grimes already has done all the work. She has created art that people want to emulate in the first place, and without that, none of this works. An appeals court has issued a ruling regarding the ongoing struggles between Apple and Epic Games. The ruling upholds an earlier court's decision, which mostly finds in favor of Apple, with one big exception. So just as a reminder, this whole thing started when Epic Games, the publisher for Fortnite, encouraged players on Iowa US and Android devices, to use some workarounds for in game transactions that would go outside the InApp transaction services. That way, Epic Games would keep the full amount of the transaction rather than Apple, or in the case of Android devices, Google getting a thirty percent cut of every one of them. Apple brought down the meteor hammer on Epic Games, and a big legal fight has been going on ever since. Well. While this particular part of the legal battle has mostly found in favor of Apple, the one bit that helps developers like Epic Games out is that Apple has to allow links and buttons that go to third party in app payment options if that's what the developer wants. So Apple doesn't have to include these options by default, but if a developer wants to give users the chance to use some other transaction method, Apple isn't allowed to block that. Apple has said it disagrees with this ruling. No big surprise there, and the company has fourteen days to file an appeal to this decision. If they do appeal, then the case would then go to either a larger group of judges on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is where this last case was heard, or it would go straight to the US Supreme Court. Microsoft is backed down in the EU in an effort to sidestep a potential anti trust probe, kind of thematically tagging onto the back of the Apple story here. So in this case, at issue is Microsoft's practice of bundling Microsoft Teams with its Office suite of productivity software. So competitors like Slack have argued that Microsoft forcing Teams into Office bundles is an anti competitive practice that Microsoft is trying to muscle out competition from any other video conferencing or messaging services. This really isn't that different from when Microsoft faced similar complaints when it bundled its web browser, which was then Internet Exploited or with the Windows operating system, though that case was further complicated by how deeply integrated Internet Explorer was with Windows. It has long been a key element in Microsoft's strategy to bundle programs together in an effort to dominate a market. While users might prefer to go a la carte when it comes to picking and choosing productivity tools, Microsoft's approach has mostly been an all or nothing affair. Now, Microsoft says it will offer options for EU customers to purchase Office with or without Microsoft Teams, though how that's actually going to manifest remains to be seen. Also, that might not be enough to prevent an antitrust probe anyway, We'll just have to see what the regulators say. In twenty twenty one, Alphabet, Google's parent company began work on a truly massive project building out a mega campus in San Jose, California. Do you know the way to San Jose? And when I say a mega campus, I mean this thing was to be huge, like eighty acres in size. According to Ours Technica, the Finnish campus was to include offices, housing units, parks, hotels, restaurants, shops, theaters, museums, and more like. It sounded like a city within a city, just to say that happens to be, you know, owned and operated by Google. But now the company has hit pause on those plants, or perhaps even stop, while construction crews have already performed a wave of demolition work that now looks like it's just going to be in limbo. According to CNBC, that demolition work destroyed some landmarks in San Jose and forced others to relocate to other parts of the city. And now Google has nothing to go in those places. It's just bulldozed territory. And there's a real fear that these spots in San Jose will just remain un finished for the foreseeable future. Google, like most big tech companies, has been making some serious cost cutting moves recently, so it's not exactly a surprise that the company would back off on such an aggressive plan. In fact, one wonders what convinced Google executives to even pursue this idea back in twenty twenty one. That was a year after the pandemic had begun and the world had really kind of adjusted to a remote work situation, which makes it seem like a pretty weird time to say, Hey, no one's in the office, so let's build a whole lot more office space, like a truly enormous amount office space, And following rounds of layoffs at Google it measures like desk sharing procedures and offices, it really seems like office space isn't way up on the company's priorities. So the question remains what happens to all that property in San Jose. And I don't know the answer to that except to say, yuck, Okay, I've got a handful more stories to go through before we get to that. Let's take another quick break, okay. California's Senate Judiciary Committee is set to deliberate on a proposed bill that if passed, would let Californians opt to delete their personal information from a company's database if they wanted to. It's nicknamed the Delete Act, and it's likely to face some pretty stiff opposition from the tech space. As I'm sure you all know, a lot of money in tech comes from data. There are companies that exist solely to collect and sell data to other companies. And while the main focus is on advertising, there are a lot of other issues here, even if you don't have a problem with targeted ads themselves, namely, law enforcement agencies have been known to use this data when it's inconvenient to you know, secure a warrant to sue such information through proper channels. Why do that when you can just buy it? Or when someone has a personal acts to grind and they use this data to track down like a former boss or that ex romantic partner. We've seen instances of that as well. So the Act is proposing a solution in which companies are obligated to allow Californians the option to just remove themselves from that data picture. This is not the first time that progressive lawmakers in California have tried something like this, but as I said, resistance in the tech sector is high to such legislation, and I imagine the journey to get this bill passed will be a lot like a walk in moor door. It ain't simple. Reuter's reports that GM and Samsung are working together to build an electric vehicle battery manufacturing plant here in the United States. Now, you may know that one of the challenges the world faces as more countries pass mandates to switch from in turn combustion engine vehicles to electric vehicles is that right now we do not produce enough batteries to meet global demand. Well, it's going to take a few years for car companies to completely change over to manufacturing evs, and in the meantime, projects like this one aim to reduce some of the bottlenecks in the production line. Now, there will be other bottlenecks, such as just getting the raw materials necessary to make batteries, but GM and Samsung are taking steps to build out the infrastructure that's going to be necessary if this conversion to evs is to succeed. Also, it's interesting to see a partnership between a South Korean tech company and a Detroit based auto manufacturer. Speaking of GM, the company is also phasing out its Chevy Bolt EV and EUV models this year. This is a blow to the affordable EV market, as the Bolt was one of the least expensive electric vehicles available to consumers here in the United States. But the Bolt is built on top of technology that no longer competes with more recent innovations, and it doesn't look like Chevy has a replacement in mind for the Bolt, at least nothing that's meant to take out that spot in the market, the affordable EV market. Rather, the company is focusing more on vehicles like electric trucks and electric SUVs because that seems to be what customers want, so fare thee well Chevy Bolt. Chinese company net Ease, which had served as the Chinese distributor for Blizzard Games until early this year, is now suing Blizzard for around forty four million dollars. So here's the rundown. Net Ease and Blizzard were in negotiations to renew the licensing deal between the two of them, but the companies failed to come to agreeable terms, so Blizzard opted to just leave net E's behind, and in the process, Blizzard shut down their servers in China, which meant players in China could no longer access their Blizzard games. Neties says that Blizzard failed to make good on several contractual obligations, including a failure to bring certain announced games to market or to issue refunds to Chinese players. Blizzard, for its part, says the company has yet to be served with any legal papers regarding a lawsuit, So they're saying Netties is saying they're suing us, but we haven't received a lawsuit. Also, Blizzard still is not running games in China because the company hasn't found a replacement for Nettie's and Chinese law mandates that game companies from outside the country have to work through a Chinese company in order to sell games and services to citizens within China. Once upon a time, scalpers looking to sell PlayStation five consoles and insane markups were sitting pretty because there was a shortage of inventory. That meant that someone who wanted a PS five had very few options open to them. If they missed out on a chance to scoop up one of just a few units that became available on any given day, they were back to waiting for the next one, or they would have to give it to the temptation to buy one from a scalper at a crazy inflated price. But now Sony has produced more consoles, plus a lot of households that really wanted one now have one. And that means that today's scalpers are starting to find out they're just playing out of luck, and at times some of them have been reduced to selling consoles for less than retail price. And I know it is a sad day when predatory jerks are hoisted by their own petard. And it only took a couple of years to get there. Finally, it's an historic time for the Palo Alto Research Center aka Park PARC. Back in nineteen seventy, Xerox founded Park as an R and D lab, similar to famous tech labs like Bell Laboratories. The researchers at Park ex faed and invented new technologies, some of which would emerge to change the world. For example, the GUY, or graphical user interface, was really first implemented at Xerox Park. Then one day an enterprising fellow named Steve Jobs went for a tour of Park's facilities and saw a demonstration of the GUY, also of the computer mouse, which wasn't invented at Park but was heavily used there, and Steve Jobs got this bright idea to offer up something similar in a personal computer, and then we get the story of the Mac Well. Xerox is now saying farewell to Park, and to be clear, Parks spun off of Xerox to become an independent company in two thousand and two, but Park's keys have now been handed over to SRII International. That organization actually began in nineteen forty six as part of Stanford University, though the organization that would evolve into SRI International actually spun off from Stanford in nineteen seventy, the same year that Park was founded. Today, SRI International is a nonprofit scientific research institute, so it sounds like a pretty great match with Park. It'll be an organization dedicated to doing cutting edge research in science and technology, potentially creating new products along the way. Xerox is going to keep a preferred research agreement with the newly merged organization, kind of like a first rights sort of situation. It also will continue to hold many of the patents that were secured by Park prior to this handoff. But yeah, interesting times. I should probably do a full episode about Xerox Park. Now that this has happened, all right, that wraps up the news for today, Tuesday, April twenty fifth, twenty twenty three. I hope you are 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.