Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jovin 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 July twelfth, two thy twenty four. There was actually a ton of news this week. I guess making up for last week, so I'm just covering like half of it because there was so much, I had to choose which stories I was going to include. As it stands, this is going to be a long one, so let's get to it. Last week, the German newspaper Der Spiegel and a Russian independent news site called The Insider revealed that Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service aka the SVR has a program that they call Project Kailo. I don't know if that's name after Kylo Renn from the Star Wars films. Anyway, this project's aim is to spread misinformation and propaganda in support of Russia's goals, particularly with regard to the ongoing war with Ukraine. And I find it interesting that a lot of media sites reference this as a bombshell report, linking Russia to these efforts. I think it's surprising, not because I don't think it's important. I do think it's important. I just figured we were all working under the assumption that this was in fact happening already. I guess the appearance of confirmation is really the story here anyway. The report says that the svr's playbook involves establishing fake news websites and then flooding these websites with misleading content, often boosted through the use of generative AI. You can write a whole lot of stuff if you offload it to AI, and if you're not really concerned about the accuracy of it, I mean, if your goal is to create misinformation, accuracy really isn't in your top concerns. The agency also made heavy use of social networking and media platforms to spread these messages, so establishing a place to post everything and then a distribution method for getting it out in front as many eyeballs as possible. So, according to these newspapers, the agency went to the trouble of actually hiring real world people to pose as protesters in various Western countries in an effort to amplify messaging, and then beyond that, they helped distribute video footage of these protests in order to get a wider release of that messaging. This is interesting because here in the United States, actually not too far from the state where I live, there was a notable white supremacist march that took place in Nashville, Tennessee. And I'm curious as to whether or not that march was amplified by efforts like this, where people were specific brought in to boost the numbers and make them larger. And then obviously that video footage of that that particular march got pretty wide circulation. And I mean it may not be at all related to the Russian efforts. I want to make that clear. This could be completely independent of that, but it does sort of fall in line with that same strategy. Also last week, Cowlan McGee and I apologize for butchering the name, but McGee wrote a piece for I News, which is an English news site, and in that piece, McGee writes that French officials identified Russian propaganda as pushing French citizens to support far right candidates during their parliamentary elections. Those took place just this past Sunday. Now, those efforts ultimately fell a little short. The far right did win quite a few seats, like one hundred and forty two seats in parliament, but that puts them in third place, behind the Left wing Party, which won one hundred eighty eight seats and the Centrist Party, which won one hundred and sixty one seats. However, no single party secured two hundred and eighty nine or more seats, which means France's president now faces the tough challenge of appointing a prime minister because with they don't have the support of a single parliamentary party. Right, there's no party that holds a majority, and if the prime minister doesn't have the support of parliament, then the government kind of stops working. So what I'm saying is that Russia's campaign, assuming that it actually had an impact on the French elections at all, was not a total failure. Yeah, they didn't secure a majority, but if you're thinking it's more in an effort to disrupt politics and to add some instability to Western governments, then there was success here, or at least it's in alignment with Russia's goals. Whether or not the efforts moved the needle at all, that's that's another question. McGee's piece in IEWS lists out numerous examples of Russian attempts to misinform, from bought controlled social accounts to fake news sites pushing lies to the public, and obviously France is just one nation that's targeted by Russia. The convergence of tools like AI and social networks, on top of how easy it is to just launch a website, has really created a perfect storm for the creation and distribution of propaganda. So, as always, I recommend viewing media through the lens of critical thinking. It's not a guarantee that you still won't get misled. That can still happen, but using critical thinking really helps cut down on the frequency at which that can happen. Make sure you're paying attention to the source of that information and what their sources are, because if we're all looking at news that's all drawing its information from a single source, and that source is compromised, well then we can't trust any of the news that was reported from it. We're in the United States, the Department of Justice announced just this past Tuesday that it had identified and disrupted a Russian operation making use of bots and misinformation to sew discord here in the states, which just as a point of reference, y'all, we do not need outside help on that. We're really good at sowing discord amongst ourselves. Anyway, the DOJ seized two domains in around one thousand social accounts believed to be part of this Russian operation. The associated accounts received a ban on x formerly known as Twitter, and they had a history of posting content with a pro Kremlin perspective. Apart from using AI to undermine governments and societies, it seems like there's not really enough of a use case for artificial intelligence to justify the truly insane amount of investment that's going into it. Now that's not just my opinion, although it is my opinion. Goldman Sachs released a newsletter warning that told businesses there there just might be this crazy, uns sustainable bubble forming around AI. But to be clear, I am applying my own point of view to what Goldman Sachs found. They didn't use words like crazy, and in fact, they were pretty light with the use of the word bubble, although at least one Goldman sax rep did refer to it as a potential bubble, not definitively a bubble, but it could be so. The report revealed that around a trillion dollars is on track to pour into the generative AI space, and that includes stuff like building out and outfitting data centers, you know, the purchase of new hardware, research and development, all this kind of stuff. Goldman Sachs says, there's also no killer application for AI that kind of justifies this crazy expenditure. So, in other words, the research newsletter says, companies are rushing into the AI space without really a clear goal or any assurance that the investment they're making is going to pay off down the road. It could be that the companies that are spending billions of dollars in the AI generative AI specifically in that field, that they're setting huge piles of cash on fire. Alah, the joker in that Dark Night movie. Jim Cavello, the head of Goldman Sachs's Global equity research, put it this way, quote, what one trillion dollar problem will AI solve? Replacing low wage jobs with tremendously costly technology is basically the polar opposite of the prior technology transitions I've witnessed in my thirty years of closely following the tech industry end quote. So what he's saying is there's not a clear problem that AI is solving, especially not one that amounts to a one trillion dollar problem, and that the ways we are seeing AI being applied right now are low cost things. And in fact, it could mean that you're spending more money with AI than you were with human beings, so you're actually costing yourself more money and you're funding that whole process. So it really sounds like shots fired across the ballot companies that have been downsizing staff in favor of relying more on generative AI, such as oh I don't know HowStuffWorks dot Com my former employer. We'll have more about the issue of AI displacing creatives later in this episode, but yeah, I'm still obviously salty about that, even though I wasn't directly affected, right, I had already moved on from how stuff works, or really my part of the company moved on from How Stuff Works. But I'm still upset that site ended up laying off the editorial staff in favor of AI generated articles. I think that was an enormous mistake. I plan on doing an episode in the near future about one of the many reasons I think that's a massive mistake, because it's not just that very talented, dedicated people lost their jobs over it. That's a big part of it. I mean, there's an emotional attachment, don't get me wrong. But I also think that there is a technological mistake that's being made, and I'm not the only one. It involves things like model collapse, as in large language model collapse, but we'll talk about that in a future episode not too long from now. Anyway, the report warns that any returns on investment are likely to be many years down the road because it's going to take time to build the AI infrastructure that actually creates meaningful improvements in stuff like business performance and costs. So in the short term, it's far more likely that running AI operations is actually going to cost more than going the alternative route. And all of that obviously becomes dangerous for companies that are currently investing heavily in the space. They might find themselves either in need of a severe course correction or they might have to convince stakeholders to you know, patiently wait for things to pay off in the future. That's kind of what Meta has been doing, particularly in the Reality Labs division, and metaverse stuff. Zuckerberg has to keep saying, this is going to cost us a lot of money in the short term, but in the long term, we believe it's the future of our business. I remain unconvinced that that's going to be the case, but that's the argument Zuckerberg has to make two investors pretty much every earnings called because they have to grapple with the fact that they're spending billions of dollars in this division and they don't have a lot to show for it yet, and the stuff they have shown has not really created an amazing response among consumers or investors. I expect we're going to see very similar stories play out in the AI space. Speaking of AI displacing jobs, into It, a company that specializes in tax preparation software announced a reorganization this week and that's going to result in downsizing staff by around ten percent of the company. Company reps say this is part of the long term strategy in which into It will hire at least that same number of people that they're laying off this year. So they're saying, like next year they're going to hire as many or more people as what they are laying off right now. That number is around one eight hundred staff and that this long term plan also involves incorporating artificial intelligence in into its offerings. No big surprise there that they're saying AI is going to be a big part of their ongoing strategy. That is kind of the messaging we're hearing across all industries right now. So into Its CEO further said that more than half of those one eight hundred employees who are being let go were selected because they failed to meet company expectations, which is a big old yikes. Like when you know arguably around five percent or more of your company isn't meeting expectations, that's to me, that's a management problem. That means that managers are not doing their job in making sure that employees have what they need and understand what they need to do in order to meet expectations. But I mean, what do I know. I'm not an expert in business or anything like that. It just it just seems that way to me. So I do think for the record that AI will have its place. I'm not totally against AI. I know I come down hard on AI a lot on this show. I do think there will be ways to integrate AI into business strategies that will be overall beneficial and not just beneficial to the bottom line, which is kind of the cynical way of looking at it right now, but to people who are actually working at those companies. I do think there are ways to use AI to enhance people's work so that they can focus on the things that really matter, while AI handles little details that are important but are not necessary for humans to handle personally. I just think there's also a ton of company executives out there who are rushing into integrating AI without fully thinking about the consequences they're going to encounter and the lives are going to impact. They're doing it quickly without fully thinking it through, and that's what leads to really big messes. Okay, speaking of a big mess, I just made one by spelling my coffee. We're going to take a quick break and I'll be right back. Okay, we're back. Coffee spillage has been contained. Cleaning efforts are ongoing, but let's get back into the episode. So, a hacker group called sieged Sec. Sie ged Sec says it has breached the systems of an organization called the Heritage Foundation and stolen a large amount of data and subsequently released that data online. The Heritage Foundation is a conservative political or organization and think tank. It is credited with being responsible for a broad platform of policy proposals, collectively referenced as Project twenty twenty five. Now, to go into Project twenty twenty five is well beyond the scope of this podcast. However, I can recommend you check out the June twenty eighth, twenty twenty four episode of Stuff they Don't Want You to Know. It is titled Project twenty twenty five. Should we be concerned anyway? The sieged sec hackers carried out the attack in part to ensure more quote transparency to the public regarding who exactly is supporting Heritage end quote. So that quote comes from a hacker who uses the handle vo viio. This hacker spoke with the new site Cyberscoop about the breach. That breach is mostly apparently a list of names of people who have been involved with or contributed to the Heritage Foundation. This is all part of a quickly developing story regarding Project twenty twenty five, and there's a lot of information and misinformation out about that as well. So again, use critical thinking when you're looking into this stuff. I do think personally that it's something to be concerned about, and that it is. There are elements of it that are pretty darn scary if you if you care about stuff like say LGBTQ rights, it's very scary, or women's autonomy rights, that kind of stuff. It gets pretty frightening. But I recommend everyone do their research and learn about it, and you know, mind where you're getting your information, so that you're you've got a reasonable handle on what's going on, because it's always important to keep that in mind when you're engaging with material, particularly material that might be confirming any biases you happen to have. I have to remind myself of that all the time. Marco Risol of hackerdose dot com has an article titled hackers may use Telegram video to gain full control of your phone. That is a heck of a headline. So first off, in case you are not familiar with Telegram, that's a smartphone based messaging app. It's also cloud based messaging and it offers end to end encryption. You can do voice calls, video calls, text messages. It has become a favored messaging app among those who value their privacy and they don't want their communications to be snoopable. They want to do end to end encryption. But an X or Twitter user, depending on how you want to call that service called. Today cyber News posted that a vulnerability in the Android version of Telegram allows an on ramp for malware. So the alleged exploit involves the target receiving a link to a video that if the target tries to launch, the video, prompts a pop up message, and that message says that Telegram's native video player is unable to play the media file in question, So don't worry, because you will be prompted to go toward a site that is claimed to be a third party video service that then will play the video. So it's saying, oh, Telegram can't play this, but just click this link, you'll go to a site that will play the video. Except it's all a ploy to trick the target into unknowingly consenting to downloading malware. The malware infects the phone and effectively hands control over to a remote operator who has essentially full administrative access to the device. At that point, they can access the camera on the phone, the microphones call logs, they can see all the apps that are saved to the phone, all that kind of stuff, all of that allegedly becomes available to the hackers. That is, if these claims are in fact true, and they might not be so. The tweet included a video demonstration of this exploit in action. However, the resolution of the video was not great, and thus it was difficult to verify that this is a legitimate video of an actual exploit. Earlier this year, Telegram actually debunked a different vulnerability claim that was made against it. So there's already precedent for false claims against Telegram, and it could turn out that this new allegation is also a hoax. But I would suggest to anyone who's using Telegram, or really any messaging service for that matter, to think twice before clicking on links to stuff, particularly if it is in relation to a message that has a clickbaity kind of vibe to it, right Like, if you get a video that's appealing to either your paranoia, right like it's a video saying, hey, is this you and this video? Or if it's something that's very it's like appealing to a salacious sign of human nature. Anything like that that should raise red flags. And you should be very cautious before following any links because it's a tried and true method to trick people into a trap. If you were an AT and T cellular customer between May and November in twenty twenty two, I have some bad news. There's a really good chance that your phone number and some information about who you texted and called has been leaked in a massive data breach. So AT and T says that essentially all cellular customers at that time period were involved in this data leak, in which some third party was able to download the information off of a cloud platform that AT and T uses. So this is another case where a hackers target not the company itself, not AT and T, but a business to business operator that AT and T uses. You know, it's a provider that has this cloud services platform, and the hackers targeted that provider. AT and T says that names were not included in this data leak. It was just numbers and then metadata about the text messages and phone calls those numbers were engaged in. However, AT and T also says it can be rather trivial to match a name with a phone number. There are a lot of databases out there that have information about phone numbers and who those numbers belong to. So all that info may already be out in the wild, and just with a little cross referencing, a hacker can figure out who this number belongs to. Some of the call and texting data related to some of the numbers was part of this attack, as I've mentioned, So it's not the contents of those phone calls or the texts. It's not like the hackers can read what someone has texted to someone else. Instead, it's a call log or a text log, so you can see which numbers have communicated with one another. According to AT and T spokesperson Alex Byers, this breach is unrelated to a different incident that the company acknowledged back in March. So AT and T has been the target of two massive hacker attacks and data breaches. Not great, Apple has assuaged the concerns of EU regulators, at least for now, regarding the company's Tap to Pay iPhone payment system. So regulators in the EU had accused Apple of jealously guarding that Tap to pay system in order to maintain a monopoly over payment processing through the iPhone, and if Apple did not open that up to third parties, to other like payment processing companies and such, Apple could face a pretty sizable fine, which is putting it lightly. By pretty sizable, I mean ten percent of the company's global revenue. Apple is a three trillion dollar company, so that is like billions of euros or billions of dollars worth of money if Apple failed to comply to these regular later demands or the company would have to cease operations in the EU to avoid it. So the services that Apple is opening things up like Apple has committed to doing this include third parties that might have their own mobile wallet features as well as their own payment processing services, but it could also include things like using your mobile phone to do stuff for all sorts of transactions, like as a hotel key or as a ticket to an event, or as a corporate badge to get into a building. That kind of stuff. It all uses NFC or near field communications technologies. So Apple appeers to have committed to this. They have a deadline of July twenty fifth to open up their system to other companies. If they do so, there'll be no further problems. If they don't, then they are facing the potential of a massive fine. Apple is not the only tech company that has had to contend with EU regulations recently. You know, the app formerly known as Twitter has been called to task for breaching online content rules under the EU's Digital Services Act or DSA. So EU regulators investigated X for seven months and found the company failed to comply with various rules requiring it to make available a searchable advertising repository so that the regulators can ensure that the advertising policies on the platform are within EU's laws. Worst, the regulators accuse X of denying them access to public data that they're supposed to be able to review. In addition, the regulators found that X's blue check mark system, which previously was all about verifying an account, but now it just means that you've paid for that service. They're now in opposition to industry practice, and, as Reuter's reporter Thu Yung Chi puts it, quote, negatively affect user's ability to make free and informed decisions about the authenticity of the accounts they interact with. End quote. X could face a fine of up to six percent of its annual global revenue. That would definitely be a huge blow to the company. I mean, it's a company that has continued to struggle in an effort to keep advertisers on board. Like revenue for Twitter, Slash, X has been a real sticky subject over the last couple of years. X will have a chance to defend itself. So this is not a cut and dried decision yet. X can come forward and attempt to either defend itself or make changes. But the European Commission says that if the findings of the investigation hold up to scrutiny, X will be fined and forced to change should it continue to operate within the EU. So yeah, tough news for X. Moving on to a different Elon Musk led company, According to Bloomberg, Tesla has had to make an adjustment to its schedule, which doesn't surprise me even a little bit. So several months ago, back in April, Elon Musk gave August eighth as a date at which time Tesla would unveil its Robotaxi business. Now, this was during the same earnings call in which Musk also told everybody that Tesla would no longer work toward releasing a low cost electric vehicle, which was a big blow. But you know, the Robotaxi thing was meant to kind of shift focus, I think, and to reframe Tesla as being more than an electric vehicle company. Like Musk has said that you should think of Tesla as an AI and robotics company. Now Tesla says it has had to delay the event and push it back to October because it turns out building autonomous taxis is actually really hard, which is something I think most people already understood. I mean, we've heard plenty of stories about how other robotaxi services have encountered issues, and goodness knows, there's no shortage of issues with Tesla's own autonomous offerings. I'm speaking specifically about autopilot and full self driving mode. So I wish to throw no shade at the engineers over at Tesla who've been working on this. I think instead this is more of a case of Elon Musk proposing an overly aggressive time table for a launch, something he's done a few times in the past, possibly as an effort to soften the blow of harder news, in this case canceling a low cost EV that was something that investors thought would really help push Tesla to the next level, and it clearly is not gonna happen. So it could be that you could argue the August eighth thing was kind of a hail Mary pass to get attention away from the low cost ev setback, and that now we're just seeing that naturally that was too aggressive a timetable, or it might be much more innocent than that. I don't know. Well, we're going to take another quick break. We will be back with some more tech news. Okay, I'm back, so Kyle Barr of Gizmoto reports that analysts are ringing the death knell for Apple Vision Pro sales. That's Apple's mixed reality headset that they introduced earlier this year. The analysts are saying that pretty much everyone who was willing to fork over the cash for one of those three five hundred dollars headsets now has one, and that there just aren't other people who are willing to do that. So, according to the analysts that bar sites, sales for the rest of twenty twenty four are likely to be pretty darn low that by August you're looking at a seventy five percent drop off in sales. An analyst firm called IDC reports that Apple has not yet sold one hundred thousand units of the ding dang darn thing. Current estimations say that's not really going to change for the rest of this year, and in my opinion, the issue is twofold. They are two main problems Apple faces with the Apple Vision pro First off, it is undeniably really expensive, and that is a big bar for entry, right like, not a lot of people have thirty five hundred dollars to drop on a tech toy. Let's be honest, it is a toy right now. Because that brings us to problem number two. There are a limited number of applications for this technology as it stands right now. Now, I personally have not had the chance to try out a headset. From what I hear, it's a really impressive experience. The problem is there's just not a whole lot you get to do. The things it does are allegedly really incredible, but they're also limited in number. Very few applications have actually been developed for the platform itself. That actually makes sense because they're such a small user base. Now I've said this many times before, but if you are a developer, you have to choose which platforms you're going to develop four and from a financial standpoint, it only makes sense to aim at platforms that are likely to see a good return on investment. You want all that time and effort that you're pouring into this development process to pay off. So with that in mind, you want your work to reach as many potential customers as possible, or a group of customers who are more likely to spend money on the thing you have made. That's not really a thing if fewer than one hundred thousand people have even bought into the platform. Apple is reportedly working on a lower cost headset that would launch late next year. That could potentially change things, but the cost needs to reach a level where more curious people can actually afford it. So even if you cut the price in half, that's really not enough, right, Like, that's still like seventeen hundred dollars. That's still a lot of money. So even cutting the price in half is not likely to see a huge rush of custom I mean, you'll probably see more than you did with thirty five hundred, but I don't know. But this might be enough to be a tipping point for developers. We might see more developers willing to spend the time and effort it takes to create things, specifically for the Vision platform, and maybe then we'll see some really innovative uses of augmented reality and virtual reality and have those find their way to the headset. I would actually love to see that happen, because as much as I have dogged on Apple for the Vision pro, I do think AR could be super cool if it's done correctly. It's just really hard to do because typically it means that people have to wear a bulky, power hungry headset on their face, and that's a big ask, Like that's asking a lot of folks to do that, and as we've seen time and again, people are rarely willing to do that unless it's for something very specific like gaming. Right VR gaming is an exception, but most people, like when it came to three D television, they weren't willing to take that step. So it's going to take some pretty compelling applications, I think, to win people over beyond just you know, your pool of bleeding edge adopters. And now for the cantankerous old coot section of our show, I bring you my physical media is dying and I'm mad about it. Rant I'm not the only one doing the sort of ranting, by the way, Sharon Harding of Ours Technica has a piece titled DVDs are dying right as streaming has made them appealing again, and that piece really goes into this so, as Harding points out, the streaming landscape actually can make it harder if you are a fan of specific stuff apart from original titles that spawned out of these streaming platforms. It can be hard to predict where stuff is going to end up. So you might start watching, you know, a series on one streaming platform and then it jumps ship to a different streaming platform. If you're not a subscriber to this other service, you're out of luck. This has happened to me on multiple occasions. Worse yet, you can have a licensing agreement expire and no one has the thing you wanted to watch. So maybe you start a series, the licensing agreement expires, the series disappears from that platform, no one else has picked it up, and you're just left without being able to watch it. That's really frustrating. Buying digital copies isn't a guarantee to fix this, right, because there's always the chance that the provider will stop supporting the service or even go out of business. Then you're left without the media that you have purchased, or rather the media that you've paid to watch. I always think about that too, like I have libraries of digital films that I like to go to every now and again, but there's always the chance that the company will just stop supporting that service, and even though I have paid to access that media, the service no longer will work and I won't be able to watch the thing I paid for. So you might turn to the solid of physical media like Blu rays and DVDs, because then you can keep a copy for yourself and no one is going to take that away from you, except that physical media is dying out too harding details how red Box, which is a DVD rental service that operated red kiosks filled with DVDs across the United States. Red Box is shutting down. It went into bankruptcy initially went into chapter eleven. Now it's shifting to chapter seven, which includes liquidation of all assets. I'm sure Mike of Red Letter Media is distressed to really hear about this one, because red Box is kind of his go to for really trashy movies. The closure means that twenty four thousand kiosks are shutting down, as will the services that were operated by Redbox's parent company, Chicken Soup. For the soul entertainment that includes services like Crackle and Popcorn Flicks, they're also going bye by. So it's not just the physical media. Some streaming media s business are going way too. Meanwhile, big box stores are cutting back on DVD sales and repurposing that floor space for other products. Like Target, for example, is going to shift to a strategy where they only offer DVDs seasonally and then the rest of the time that space will be meant for something else. Sony has announced it's going to stop producing recordable Blu ray discs in the near future, and Harding does a really great job of explaining the reasoning behind why all these shifts are happening, Because the numbers don't lie and physical media is far less profitable these days. There's just fewer people buying physical media, but considering the chaos that is streaming, this means consumers will have fewer options when it comes to ensuring that they have access to the media they love. Heck, over the last couple of years, I've actually started collecting physical media again. I had kind of shifted away from that for quite some time, but I'm back to it now and it's largely because of this issue. I even belong to a monthly horror movie club where I get four discs per month. And for folks like me, this trend is pretty sad and also frustrating. It's also totally understandable. It's not like I fault the companies for doing this. I don't expect companies to continue to manufacture physical discs at a loss, but the fact is we're seeing this move away from physical media entirely while simultaneously dealing with the constantly shifting landscape of streaming, and that stinks. Speaking of physical media, the German Navy is looking to phase out a legacy technology for its fleet of anti submarine frigates. See. These ships currently rely on the storage system that saves data to eight inch floppy discs. Yeah, floppy discs. I wager there's some of y'all out there who have never even used floppy discs. I grew up using five and a quarter and then later three and a half inch floppies. There are people older than me who used much larger floppy discs. Apart from an escape room that I participated in recently. I haven't touched a floppy disk in years. It's kind of crazy to think that the German Navy is still running equipment that relies on this legacy technology. Some would call it an obsolete technology, but here we are moving stuff to a new system. Isn't easy. Modernizing hardware requires a lot of considerations because changing one thing can sometimes break something else. According to the site Tom's Hardware, the German Navy is looking at an emulator to provide the same kind of storage and data retrieval services as the floppy disk system did, and that means the Navy won't have to retool their entire process. The emulator would serve as a substitute for the floppy drive, but otherwise things would largely operate the same way they have for years. Kind of wild that we're into twenty twenty four and this is finally being addressed. Hurricane Beryl packed a heck of a wallop when it landed in Texas earlier this week. The storm knocked out power for nearly two two million Houston residents. Meanwhile, a massive heat wave created really dangerous situations for folks living in the Houston area. Not only did they have to deal with flooding and other damage from the hurricane, but the temperatures and humidity meant that going without power and access to air conditioning was like a real health hazard, making matters more complicated than necessary would be. Center Point Energy, a utility company in the Houston area, Texas, famously is not part of the US National Power Grid. Texas opted to go at lone wolf style, which frequently does not work out so great for the residents of Texas, but it seems to make business executives and local politicians a whole lot of money anyway. Center Point Energy doesn't have a dedicated app, so Houston citizens began to turn to a different app in an effort to get information about where power outages currently are in the city. That app happens to belong to the fast food chain WAA Burger. Waaburger's app includes a map that shows all local Waterburger locations within the Houston area, and there's an icon that indicates whether or not the store is open. So by opening up the map and seeing where stores are closed and where they're open, Houston citizens could actually figure out which regions were still affected by power allagies because the ones that have power allagies. Clearly those restaurants aren't going to be open. So users shared this discovery on x and subsequently Waaburger's app saw a flurry of downloads. It went from being fortieth on iOS's app store to sixteenth. Necessity is the Mother of Invention. Waaburger, for its part, has responded by saying they never intended their app to be used this way, and they really hope that people are safe. Like they're not objecting to the app being used this way, they're showing their concern for the community. Researchers have created a urine processing system meant for space suits, similar to this still suits in the science fiction series Doom. The researchers have created a system that includes a quote vacuum based external catheter leading to a combined forward reverse osmosis unit end quote in order to take an astronaut's urine, remove all the yucky bits, and purify it into drinkable water. And it's said to be eighty seven percent efficient, so I assume that means it can reclaim about eighty seven percent of the water content in urine. That means you can pee and in about five minutes enjoy a refreshing beverage made from your pee. I'm being a little cheeky about this because we all need to remember all the water of our planet has been here for millions of years, hundreds of millions of years. For us, water is kind of like the force. It binds us and penetrates us and moves through us. Sometimes it moves through us in the middle of a Peter Jackson movie. He really needs to make his films less than four hours long. Anyway. I think most folks are aware that water purification is a thing. We depend on water purification already, right, like we process waste water so that we can then purify it and make it drinkable and usable. Again, it's just a little freaky to think of it as a miniaturized system that's wearable and that you could complete this purification process in less than ten minutes. The system will undoubtedly be handy if we ever do figure out a safe way to send astronauts on longer space missions like to Mars and such. This kind of thing will be necessary in order to be able to process the water that is brought on board and to maximize it to use it as long as is possible. Because every bit of weight that you add to a space mission requires more energy to get that thing off the planet. So these considerations are challenging. You have to have ways to be able to process this stuff, and to do so while it's worked within a suit means that you can do it even if someone has gone out on a spacewalk mission. You know, when you're on board a spacecraft or in the space station using the onboard facilities whenever you need to use the bathroom that has these sort of reclamation systems built into it already. But if you're doing something that's just in the suit, then typically what you're really relying upon is essentially a diaper. So this kind of system opens up the capacity for recapturing water from waste even when you're out on a spacewalk and you're not inside a spacecraft. Okay, I've got a couple of article recommendations for you all this week. First up is Samuel Aksen's piece for Ours Technica. It is titled shady company relaunches popular old tech blogs steals writer's identities yuck. Okay, so apparently this web advertising company has resurrected some dead blogs blogs that used to be active on the Internet but haven't been for years, and are using AI to pose as the people who originally contributed to those blogs, and thus churning out garbage articles with the bylines of people who aren't actually creating that work. Clearly, this is unethical, Like, there's no question this is unethical. If you were one of those writers and you started to see junk getting pushed out with your name attached to it, that would be bad because imagine that you're applying for a job and your potential employer has researched you and just found all these articles that are just terrible. They're subpar, and they have your name attached to it, but it wasn't written by you. That would be really awful. As someone who used to write for a website, you know, a website that notably dumped its editorial staff in favor of AI generated pieces, I definitely have concerns about this kind of thing. So yeah, I think it's well worth a read. Next up, there's a piece by Sky Jacobs of tech Spot. It is titled why you should be Suspicious of that verified Amazon customer review. It examined something I think a lot of people had already suspected that those reviews you see on Amazon listings, even from supposed trusted consumers, are sometimes just bought and paid for by various merchants, meaning you can't trust the reviews, which strikes right at the heart of one of Amazon's most valuable contributions. In fact, I think customer reviews are part of what helped Amazon navigate the dot com bubble crisis in the early two thousands. Anyway, both of those articles are well worth your time and you should check those out. That's it for the news this week. I'll chat with you next week, probably about large language model collapse and how AI training itself on other AI ultimately leads to a desolate landscape of garbage content that's fun to talk about. We'll chat about that next week, as well as some other stuff. And I hope you have a fantastic weekend, 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, Jovin 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 July twelfth, two thy twenty four. There was actually a ton of news this week. I guess making up for last week, so I'm just covering like half of it because there was so much, I had to choose which stories I was going to include. As it stands, this is going to be a long one, so let's get to it. Last week, the German newspaper Der Spiegel and a Russian independent news site called The Insider revealed that Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service aka the SVR has a program that they call Project Kailo. I don't know if that's name after Kylo Renn from the Star Wars films. Anyway, this project's aim is to spread misinformation and propaganda in support of Russia's goals, particularly with regard to the ongoing war with Ukraine. And I find it interesting that a lot of media sites reference this as a bombshell report, linking Russia to these efforts. I think it's surprising, not because I don't think it's important. I do think it's important. I just figured we were all working under the assumption that this was in fact happening already. I guess the appearance of confirmation is really the story here anyway. The report says that the svr's playbook involves establishing fake news websites and then flooding these websites with misleading content, often boosted through the use of generative AI. You can write a whole lot of stuff if you offload it to AI, and if you're not really concerned about the accuracy of it, I mean, if your goal is to create misinformation, accuracy really isn't in your top concerns. The agency also made heavy use of social networking and media platforms to spread these messages, so establishing a place to post everything and then a distribution method for getting it out in front as many eyeballs as possible. So, according to these newspapers, the agency went to the trouble of actually hiring real world people to pose as protesters in various Western countries in an effort to amplify messaging, and then beyond that, they helped distribute video footage of these protests in order to get a wider release of that messaging. This is interesting because here in the United States, actually not too far from the state where I live, there was a notable white supremacist march that took place in Nashville, Tennessee. And I'm curious as to whether or not that march was amplified by efforts like this, where people were specific brought in to boost the numbers and make them larger. And then obviously that video footage of that that particular march got pretty wide circulation. And I mean it may not be at all related to the Russian efforts. I want to make that clear. This could be completely independent of that, but it does sort of fall in line with that same strategy. Also last week, Cowlan McGee and I apologize for butchering the name, but McGee wrote a piece for I News, which is an English news site, and in that piece, McGee writes that French officials identified Russian propaganda as pushing French citizens to support far right candidates during their parliamentary elections. Those took place just this past Sunday. Now, those efforts ultimately fell a little short. The far right did win quite a few seats, like one hundred and forty two seats in parliament, but that puts them in third place, behind the Left wing Party, which won one hundred eighty eight seats and the Centrist Party, which won one hundred and sixty one seats. However, no single party secured two hundred and eighty nine or more seats, which means France's president now faces the tough challenge of appointing a prime minister because with they don't have the support of a single parliamentary party. Right, there's no party that holds a majority, and if the prime minister doesn't have the support of parliament, then the government kind of stops working. So what I'm saying is that Russia's campaign, assuming that it actually had an impact on the French elections at all, was not a total failure. Yeah, they didn't secure a majority, but if you're thinking it's more in an effort to disrupt politics and to add some instability to Western governments, then there was success here, or at least it's in alignment with Russia's goals. Whether or not the efforts moved the needle at all, that's that's another question. McGee's piece in IEWS lists out numerous examples of Russian attempts to misinform, from bought controlled social accounts to fake news sites pushing lies to the public, and obviously France is just one nation that's targeted by Russia. The convergence of tools like AI and social networks, on top of how easy it is to just launch a website, has really created a perfect storm for the creation and distribution of propaganda. So, as always, I recommend viewing media through the lens of critical thinking. It's not a guarantee that you still won't get misled. That can still happen, but using critical thinking really helps cut down on the frequency at which that can happen. Make sure you're paying attention to the source of that information and what their sources are, because if we're all looking at news that's all drawing its information from a single source, and that source is compromised, well then we can't trust any of the news that was reported from it. We're in the United States, the Department of Justice announced just this past Tuesday that it had identified and disrupted a Russian operation making use of bots and misinformation to sew discord here in the states, which just as a point of reference, y'all, we do not need outside help on that. We're really good at sowing discord amongst ourselves. Anyway, the DOJ seized two domains in around one thousand social accounts believed to be part of this Russian operation. The associated accounts received a ban on x formerly known as Twitter, and they had a history of posting content with a pro Kremlin perspective. Apart from using AI to undermine governments and societies, it seems like there's not really enough of a use case for artificial intelligence to justify the truly insane amount of investment that's going into it. Now that's not just my opinion, although it is my opinion. Goldman Sachs released a newsletter warning that told businesses there there just might be this crazy, uns sustainable bubble forming around AI. But to be clear, I am applying my own point of view to what Goldman Sachs found. They didn't use words like crazy, and in fact, they were pretty light with the use of the word bubble, although at least one Goldman sax rep did refer to it as a potential bubble, not definitively a bubble, but it could be so. The report revealed that around a trillion dollars is on track to pour into the generative AI space, and that includes stuff like building out and outfitting data centers, you know, the purchase of new hardware, research and development, all this kind of stuff. Goldman Sachs says, there's also no killer application for AI that kind of justifies this crazy expenditure. So, in other words, the research newsletter says, companies are rushing into the AI space without really a clear goal or any assurance that the investment they're making is going to pay off down the road. It could be that the companies that are spending billions of dollars in the AI generative AI specifically in that field, that they're setting huge piles of cash on fire. Alah, the joker in that Dark Night movie. Jim Cavello, the head of Goldman Sachs's Global equity research, put it this way, quote, what one trillion dollar problem will AI solve? Replacing low wage jobs with tremendously costly technology is basically the polar opposite of the prior technology transitions I've witnessed in my thirty years of closely following the tech industry end quote. So what he's saying is there's not a clear problem that AI is solving, especially not one that amounts to a one trillion dollar problem, and that the ways we are seeing AI being applied right now are low cost things. And in fact, it could mean that you're spending more money with AI than you were with human beings, so you're actually costing yourself more money and you're funding that whole process. So it really sounds like shots fired across the ballot companies that have been downsizing staff in favor of relying more on generative AI, such as oh I don't know HowStuffWorks dot Com my former employer. We'll have more about the issue of AI displacing creatives later in this episode, but yeah, I'm still obviously salty about that, even though I wasn't directly affected, right, I had already moved on from how stuff works, or really my part of the company moved on from How Stuff Works. But I'm still upset that site ended up laying off the editorial staff in favor of AI generated articles. I think that was an enormous mistake. I plan on doing an episode in the near future about one of the many reasons I think that's a massive mistake, because it's not just that very talented, dedicated people lost their jobs over it. That's a big part of it. I mean, there's an emotional attachment, don't get me wrong. But I also think that there is a technological mistake that's being made, and I'm not the only one. It involves things like model collapse, as in large language model collapse, but we'll talk about that in a future episode not too long from now. Anyway, the report warns that any returns on investment are likely to be many years down the road because it's going to take time to build the AI infrastructure that actually creates meaningful improvements in stuff like business performance and costs. So in the short term, it's far more likely that running AI operations is actually going to cost more than going the alternative route. And all of that obviously becomes dangerous for companies that are currently investing heavily in the space. They might find themselves either in need of a severe course correction or they might have to convince stakeholders to you know, patiently wait for things to pay off in the future. That's kind of what Meta has been doing, particularly in the Reality Labs division, and metaverse stuff. Zuckerberg has to keep saying, this is going to cost us a lot of money in the short term, but in the long term, we believe it's the future of our business. I remain unconvinced that that's going to be the case, but that's the argument Zuckerberg has to make two investors pretty much every earnings called because they have to grapple with the fact that they're spending billions of dollars in this division and they don't have a lot to show for it yet, and the stuff they have shown has not really created an amazing response among consumers or investors. I expect we're going to see very similar stories play out in the AI space. Speaking of AI displacing jobs, into It, a company that specializes in tax preparation software announced a reorganization this week and that's going to result in downsizing staff by around ten percent of the company. Company reps say this is part of the long term strategy in which into It will hire at least that same number of people that they're laying off this year. So they're saying, like next year they're going to hire as many or more people as what they are laying off right now. That number is around one eight hundred staff and that this long term plan also involves incorporating artificial intelligence in into its offerings. No big surprise there that they're saying AI is going to be a big part of their ongoing strategy. That is kind of the messaging we're hearing across all industries right now. So into Its CEO further said that more than half of those one eight hundred employees who are being let go were selected because they failed to meet company expectations, which is a big old yikes. Like when you know arguably around five percent or more of your company isn't meeting expectations, that's to me, that's a management problem. That means that managers are not doing their job in making sure that employees have what they need and understand what they need to do in order to meet expectations. But I mean, what do I know. I'm not an expert in business or anything like that. It just it just seems that way to me. So I do think for the record that AI will have its place. I'm not totally against AI. I know I come down hard on AI a lot on this show. I do think there will be ways to integrate AI into business strategies that will be overall beneficial and not just beneficial to the bottom line, which is kind of the cynical way of looking at it right now, but to people who are actually working at those companies. I do think there are ways to use AI to enhance people's work so that they can focus on the things that really matter, while AI handles little details that are important but are not necessary for humans to handle personally. I just think there's also a ton of company executives out there who are rushing into integrating AI without fully thinking about the consequences they're going to encounter and the lives are going to impact. They're doing it quickly without fully thinking it through, and that's what leads to really big messes. Okay, speaking of a big mess, I just made one by spelling my coffee. We're going to take a quick break and I'll be right back. Okay, we're back. Coffee spillage has been contained. Cleaning efforts are ongoing, but let's get back into the episode. So, a hacker group called sieged Sec. Sie ged Sec says it has breached the systems of an organization called the Heritage Foundation and stolen a large amount of data and subsequently released that data online. The Heritage Foundation is a conservative political or organization and think tank. It is credited with being responsible for a broad platform of policy proposals, collectively referenced as Project twenty twenty five. Now, to go into Project twenty twenty five is well beyond the scope of this podcast. However, I can recommend you check out the June twenty eighth, twenty twenty four episode of Stuff they Don't Want You to Know. It is titled Project twenty twenty five. Should we be concerned anyway? The sieged sec hackers carried out the attack in part to ensure more quote transparency to the public regarding who exactly is supporting Heritage end quote. So that quote comes from a hacker who uses the handle vo viio. This hacker spoke with the new site Cyberscoop about the breach. That breach is mostly apparently a list of names of people who have been involved with or contributed to the Heritage Foundation. This is all part of a quickly developing story regarding Project twenty twenty five, and there's a lot of information and misinformation out about that as well. So again, use critical thinking when you're looking into this stuff. I do think personally that it's something to be concerned about, and that it is. There are elements of it that are pretty darn scary if you if you care about stuff like say LGBTQ rights, it's very scary, or women's autonomy rights, that kind of stuff. It gets pretty frightening. But I recommend everyone do their research and learn about it, and you know, mind where you're getting your information, so that you're you've got a reasonable handle on what's going on, because it's always important to keep that in mind when you're engaging with material, particularly material that might be confirming any biases you happen to have. I have to remind myself of that all the time. Marco Risol of hackerdose dot com has an article titled hackers may use Telegram video to gain full control of your phone. That is a heck of a headline. So first off, in case you are not familiar with Telegram, that's a smartphone based messaging app. It's also cloud based messaging and it offers end to end encryption. You can do voice calls, video calls, text messages. It has become a favored messaging app among those who value their privacy and they don't want their communications to be snoopable. They want to do end to end encryption. But an X or Twitter user, depending on how you want to call that service called. Today cyber News posted that a vulnerability in the Android version of Telegram allows an on ramp for malware. So the alleged exploit involves the target receiving a link to a video that if the target tries to launch, the video, prompts a pop up message, and that message says that Telegram's native video player is unable to play the media file in question, So don't worry, because you will be prompted to go toward a site that is claimed to be a third party video service that then will play the video. So it's saying, oh, Telegram can't play this, but just click this link, you'll go to a site that will play the video. Except it's all a ploy to trick the target into unknowingly consenting to downloading malware. The malware infects the phone and effectively hands control over to a remote operator who has essentially full administrative access to the device. At that point, they can access the camera on the phone, the microphones call logs, they can see all the apps that are saved to the phone, all that kind of stuff, all of that allegedly becomes available to the hackers. That is, if these claims are in fact true, and they might not be so. The tweet included a video demonstration of this exploit in action. However, the resolution of the video was not great, and thus it was difficult to verify that this is a legitimate video of an actual exploit. Earlier this year, Telegram actually debunked a different vulnerability claim that was made against it. So there's already precedent for false claims against Telegram, and it could turn out that this new allegation is also a hoax. But I would suggest to anyone who's using Telegram, or really any messaging service for that matter, to think twice before clicking on links to stuff, particularly if it is in relation to a message that has a clickbaity kind of vibe to it, right Like, if you get a video that's appealing to either your paranoia, right like it's a video saying, hey, is this you and this video? Or if it's something that's very it's like appealing to a salacious sign of human nature. Anything like that that should raise red flags. And you should be very cautious before following any links because it's a tried and true method to trick people into a trap. If you were an AT and T cellular customer between May and November in twenty twenty two, I have some bad news. There's a really good chance that your phone number and some information about who you texted and called has been leaked in a massive data breach. So AT and T says that essentially all cellular customers at that time period were involved in this data leak, in which some third party was able to download the information off of a cloud platform that AT and T uses. So this is another case where a hackers target not the company itself, not AT and T, but a business to business operator that AT and T uses. You know, it's a provider that has this cloud services platform, and the hackers targeted that provider. AT and T says that names were not included in this data leak. It was just numbers and then metadata about the text messages and phone calls those numbers were engaged in. However, AT and T also says it can be rather trivial to match a name with a phone number. There are a lot of databases out there that have information about phone numbers and who those numbers belong to. So all that info may already be out in the wild, and just with a little cross referencing, a hacker can figure out who this number belongs to. Some of the call and texting data related to some of the numbers was part of this attack, as I've mentioned, So it's not the contents of those phone calls or the texts. It's not like the hackers can read what someone has texted to someone else. Instead, it's a call log or a text log, so you can see which numbers have communicated with one another. According to AT and T spokesperson Alex Byers, this breach is unrelated to a different incident that the company acknowledged back in March. So AT and T has been the target of two massive hacker attacks and data breaches. Not great, Apple has assuaged the concerns of EU regulators, at least for now, regarding the company's Tap to Pay iPhone payment system. So regulators in the EU had accused Apple of jealously guarding that Tap to pay system in order to maintain a monopoly over payment processing through the iPhone, and if Apple did not open that up to third parties, to other like payment processing companies and such, Apple could face a pretty sizable fine, which is putting it lightly. By pretty sizable, I mean ten percent of the company's global revenue. Apple is a three trillion dollar company, so that is like billions of euros or billions of dollars worth of money if Apple failed to comply to these regular later demands or the company would have to cease operations in the EU to avoid it. So the services that Apple is opening things up like Apple has committed to doing this include third parties that might have their own mobile wallet features as well as their own payment processing services, but it could also include things like using your mobile phone to do stuff for all sorts of transactions, like as a hotel key or as a ticket to an event, or as a corporate badge to get into a building. That kind of stuff. It all uses NFC or near field communications technologies. So Apple appeers to have committed to this. They have a deadline of July twenty fifth to open up their system to other companies. If they do so, there'll be no further problems. If they don't, then they are facing the potential of a massive fine. Apple is not the only tech company that has had to contend with EU regulations recently. You know, the app formerly known as Twitter has been called to task for breaching online content rules under the EU's Digital Services Act or DSA. So EU regulators investigated X for seven months and found the company failed to comply with various rules requiring it to make available a searchable advertising repository so that the regulators can ensure that the advertising policies on the platform are within EU's laws. Worst, the regulators accuse X of denying them access to public data that they're supposed to be able to review. In addition, the regulators found that X's blue check mark system, which previously was all about verifying an account, but now it just means that you've paid for that service. They're now in opposition to industry practice, and, as Reuter's reporter Thu Yung Chi puts it, quote, negatively affect user's ability to make free and informed decisions about the authenticity of the accounts they interact with. End quote. X could face a fine of up to six percent of its annual global revenue. That would definitely be a huge blow to the company. I mean, it's a company that has continued to struggle in an effort to keep advertisers on board. Like revenue for Twitter, Slash, X has been a real sticky subject over the last couple of years. X will have a chance to defend itself. So this is not a cut and dried decision yet. X can come forward and attempt to either defend itself or make changes. But the European Commission says that if the findings of the investigation hold up to scrutiny, X will be fined and forced to change should it continue to operate within the EU. So yeah, tough news for X. Moving on to a different Elon Musk led company, According to Bloomberg, Tesla has had to make an adjustment to its schedule, which doesn't surprise me even a little bit. So several months ago, back in April, Elon Musk gave August eighth as a date at which time Tesla would unveil its Robotaxi business. Now, this was during the same earnings call in which Musk also told everybody that Tesla would no longer work toward releasing a low cost electric vehicle, which was a big blow. But you know, the Robotaxi thing was meant to kind of shift focus, I think, and to reframe Tesla as being more than an electric vehicle company. Like Musk has said that you should think of Tesla as an AI and robotics company. Now Tesla says it has had to delay the event and push it back to October because it turns out building autonomous taxis is actually really hard, which is something I think most people already understood. I mean, we've heard plenty of stories about how other robotaxi services have encountered issues, and goodness knows, there's no shortage of issues with Tesla's own autonomous offerings. I'm speaking specifically about autopilot and full self driving mode. So I wish to throw no shade at the engineers over at Tesla who've been working on this. I think instead this is more of a case of Elon Musk proposing an overly aggressive time table for a launch, something he's done a few times in the past, possibly as an effort to soften the blow of harder news, in this case canceling a low cost EV that was something that investors thought would really help push Tesla to the next level, and it clearly is not gonna happen. So it could be that you could argue the August eighth thing was kind of a hail Mary pass to get attention away from the low cost ev setback, and that now we're just seeing that naturally that was too aggressive a timetable, or it might be much more innocent than that. I don't know. Well, we're going to take another quick break. We will be back with some more tech news. Okay, I'm back, so Kyle Barr of Gizmoto reports that analysts are ringing the death knell for Apple Vision Pro sales. That's Apple's mixed reality headset that they introduced earlier this year. The analysts are saying that pretty much everyone who was willing to fork over the cash for one of those three five hundred dollars headsets now has one, and that there just aren't other people who are willing to do that. So, according to the analysts that bar sites, sales for the rest of twenty twenty four are likely to be pretty darn low that by August you're looking at a seventy five percent drop off in sales. An analyst firm called IDC reports that Apple has not yet sold one hundred thousand units of the ding dang darn thing. Current estimations say that's not really going to change for the rest of this year, and in my opinion, the issue is twofold. They are two main problems Apple faces with the Apple Vision pro First off, it is undeniably really expensive, and that is a big bar for entry, right like, not a lot of people have thirty five hundred dollars to drop on a tech toy. Let's be honest, it is a toy right now. Because that brings us to problem number two. There are a limited number of applications for this technology as it stands right now. Now, I personally have not had the chance to try out a headset. From what I hear, it's a really impressive experience. The problem is there's just not a whole lot you get to do. The things it does are allegedly really incredible, but they're also limited in number. Very few applications have actually been developed for the platform itself. That actually makes sense because they're such a small user base. Now I've said this many times before, but if you are a developer, you have to choose which platforms you're going to develop four and from a financial standpoint, it only makes sense to aim at platforms that are likely to see a good return on investment. You want all that time and effort that you're pouring into this development process to pay off. So with that in mind, you want your work to reach as many potential customers as possible, or a group of customers who are more likely to spend money on the thing you have made. That's not really a thing if fewer than one hundred thousand people have even bought into the platform. Apple is reportedly working on a lower cost headset that would launch late next year. That could potentially change things, but the cost needs to reach a level where more curious people can actually afford it. So even if you cut the price in half, that's really not enough, right, Like, that's still like seventeen hundred dollars. That's still a lot of money. So even cutting the price in half is not likely to see a huge rush of custom I mean, you'll probably see more than you did with thirty five hundred, but I don't know. But this might be enough to be a tipping point for developers. We might see more developers willing to spend the time and effort it takes to create things, specifically for the Vision platform, and maybe then we'll see some really innovative uses of augmented reality and virtual reality and have those find their way to the headset. I would actually love to see that happen, because as much as I have dogged on Apple for the Vision pro, I do think AR could be super cool if it's done correctly. It's just really hard to do because typically it means that people have to wear a bulky, power hungry headset on their face, and that's a big ask, Like that's asking a lot of folks to do that, and as we've seen time and again, people are rarely willing to do that unless it's for something very specific like gaming. Right VR gaming is an exception, but most people, like when it came to three D television, they weren't willing to take that step. So it's going to take some pretty compelling applications, I think, to win people over beyond just you know, your pool of bleeding edge adopters. And now for the cantankerous old coot section of our show, I bring you my physical media is dying and I'm mad about it. Rant I'm not the only one doing the sort of ranting, by the way, Sharon Harding of Ours Technica has a piece titled DVDs are dying right as streaming has made them appealing again, and that piece really goes into this so, as Harding points out, the streaming landscape actually can make it harder if you are a fan of specific stuff apart from original titles that spawned out of these streaming platforms. It can be hard to predict where stuff is going to end up. So you might start watching, you know, a series on one streaming platform and then it jumps ship to a different streaming platform. If you're not a subscriber to this other service, you're out of luck. This has happened to me on multiple occasions. Worse yet, you can have a licensing agreement expire and no one has the thing you wanted to watch. So maybe you start a series, the licensing agreement expires, the series disappears from that platform, no one else has picked it up, and you're just left without being able to watch it. That's really frustrating. Buying digital copies isn't a guarantee to fix this, right, because there's always the chance that the provider will stop supporting the service or even go out of business. Then you're left without the media that you have purchased, or rather the media that you've paid to watch. I always think about that too, like I have libraries of digital films that I like to go to every now and again, but there's always the chance that the company will just stop supporting that service, and even though I have paid to access that media, the service no longer will work and I won't be able to watch the thing I paid for. So you might turn to the solid of physical media like Blu rays and DVDs, because then you can keep a copy for yourself and no one is going to take that away from you, except that physical media is dying out too harding details how red Box, which is a DVD rental service that operated red kiosks filled with DVDs across the United States. Red Box is shutting down. It went into bankruptcy initially went into chapter eleven. Now it's shifting to chapter seven, which includes liquidation of all assets. I'm sure Mike of Red Letter Media is distressed to really hear about this one, because red Box is kind of his go to for really trashy movies. The closure means that twenty four thousand kiosks are shutting down, as will the services that were operated by Redbox's parent company, Chicken Soup. For the soul entertainment that includes services like Crackle and Popcorn Flicks, they're also going bye by. So it's not just the physical media. Some streaming media s business are going way too. Meanwhile, big box stores are cutting back on DVD sales and repurposing that floor space for other products. Like Target, for example, is going to shift to a strategy where they only offer DVDs seasonally and then the rest of the time that space will be meant for something else. Sony has announced it's going to stop producing recordable Blu ray discs in the near future, and Harding does a really great job of explaining the reasoning behind why all these shifts are happening, Because the numbers don't lie and physical media is far less profitable these days. There's just fewer people buying physical media, but considering the chaos that is streaming, this means consumers will have fewer options when it comes to ensuring that they have access to the media they love. Heck, over the last couple of years, I've actually started collecting physical media again. I had kind of shifted away from that for quite some time, but I'm back to it now and it's largely because of this issue. I even belong to a monthly horror movie club where I get four discs per month. And for folks like me, this trend is pretty sad and also frustrating. It's also totally understandable. It's not like I fault the companies for doing this. I don't expect companies to continue to manufacture physical discs at a loss, but the fact is we're seeing this move away from physical media entirely while simultaneously dealing with the constantly shifting landscape of streaming, and that stinks. Speaking of physical media, the German Navy is looking to phase out a legacy technology for its fleet of anti submarine frigates. See. These ships currently rely on the storage system that saves data to eight inch floppy discs. Yeah, floppy discs. I wager there's some of y'all out there who have never even used floppy discs. I grew up using five and a quarter and then later three and a half inch floppies. There are people older than me who used much larger floppy discs. Apart from an escape room that I participated in recently. I haven't touched a floppy disk in years. It's kind of crazy to think that the German Navy is still running equipment that relies on this legacy technology. Some would call it an obsolete technology, but here we are moving stuff to a new system. Isn't easy. Modernizing hardware requires a lot of considerations because changing one thing can sometimes break something else. According to the site Tom's Hardware, the German Navy is looking at an emulator to provide the same kind of storage and data retrieval services as the floppy disk system did, and that means the Navy won't have to retool their entire process. The emulator would serve as a substitute for the floppy drive, but otherwise things would largely operate the same way they have for years. Kind of wild that we're into twenty twenty four and this is finally being addressed. Hurricane Beryl packed a heck of a wallop when it landed in Texas earlier this week. The storm knocked out power for nearly two two million Houston residents. Meanwhile, a massive heat wave created really dangerous situations for folks living in the Houston area. Not only did they have to deal with flooding and other damage from the hurricane, but the temperatures and humidity meant that going without power and access to air conditioning was like a real health hazard, making matters more complicated than necessary would be. Center Point Energy, a utility company in the Houston area, Texas, famously is not part of the US National Power Grid. Texas opted to go at lone wolf style, which frequently does not work out so great for the residents of Texas, but it seems to make business executives and local politicians a whole lot of money anyway. Center Point Energy doesn't have a dedicated app, so Houston citizens began to turn to a different app in an effort to get information about where power outages currently are in the city. That app happens to belong to the fast food chain WAA Burger. Waaburger's app includes a map that shows all local Waterburger locations within the Houston area, and there's an icon that indicates whether or not the store is open. So by opening up the map and seeing where stores are closed and where they're open, Houston citizens could actually figure out which regions were still affected by power allagies because the ones that have power allagies. Clearly those restaurants aren't going to be open. So users shared this discovery on x and subsequently Waaburger's app saw a flurry of downloads. It went from being fortieth on iOS's app store to sixteenth. Necessity is the Mother of Invention. Waaburger, for its part, has responded by saying they never intended their app to be used this way, and they really hope that people are safe. Like they're not objecting to the app being used this way, they're showing their concern for the community. Researchers have created a urine processing system meant for space suits, similar to this still suits in the science fiction series Doom. The researchers have created a system that includes a quote vacuum based external catheter leading to a combined forward reverse osmosis unit end quote in order to take an astronaut's urine, remove all the yucky bits, and purify it into drinkable water. And it's said to be eighty seven percent efficient, so I assume that means it can reclaim about eighty seven percent of the water content in urine. That means you can pee and in about five minutes enjoy a refreshing beverage made from your pee. I'm being a little cheeky about this because we all need to remember all the water of our planet has been here for millions of years, hundreds of millions of years. For us, water is kind of like the force. It binds us and penetrates us and moves through us. Sometimes it moves through us in the middle of a Peter Jackson movie. He really needs to make his films less than four hours long. Anyway. I think most folks are aware that water purification is a thing. We depend on water purification already, right, like we process waste water so that we can then purify it and make it drinkable and usable. Again, it's just a little freaky to think of it as a miniaturized system that's wearable and that you could complete this purification process in less than ten minutes. The system will undoubtedly be handy if we ever do figure out a safe way to send astronauts on longer space missions like to Mars and such. This kind of thing will be necessary in order to be able to process the water that is brought on board and to maximize it to use it as long as is possible. Because every bit of weight that you add to a space mission requires more energy to get that thing off the planet. So these considerations are challenging. You have to have ways to be able to process this stuff, and to do so while it's worked within a suit means that you can do it even if someone has gone out on a spacewalk mission. You know, when you're on board a spacecraft or in the space station using the onboard facilities whenever you need to use the bathroom that has these sort of reclamation systems built into it already. But if you're doing something that's just in the suit, then typically what you're really relying upon is essentially a diaper. So this kind of system opens up the capacity for recapturing water from waste even when you're out on a spacewalk and you're not inside a spacecraft. Okay, I've got a couple of article recommendations for you all this week. First up is Samuel Aksen's piece for Ours Technica. It is titled shady company relaunches popular old tech blogs steals writer's identities yuck. Okay, so apparently this web advertising company has resurrected some dead blogs blogs that used to be active on the Internet but haven't been for years, and are using AI to pose as the people who originally contributed to those blogs, and thus churning out garbage articles with the bylines of people who aren't actually creating that work. Clearly, this is unethical, Like, there's no question this is unethical. If you were one of those writers and you started to see junk getting pushed out with your name attached to it, that would be bad because imagine that you're applying for a job and your potential employer has researched you and just found all these articles that are just terrible. They're subpar, and they have your name attached to it, but it wasn't written by you. That would be really awful. As someone who used to write for a website, you know, a website that notably dumped its editorial staff in favor of AI generated pieces, I definitely have concerns about this kind of thing. So yeah, I think it's well worth a read. Next up, there's a piece by Sky Jacobs of tech Spot. It is titled why you should be Suspicious of that verified Amazon customer review. It examined something I think a lot of people had already suspected that those reviews you see on Amazon listings, even from supposed trusted consumers, are sometimes just bought and paid for by various merchants, meaning you can't trust the reviews, which strikes right at the heart of one of Amazon's most valuable contributions. In fact, I think customer reviews are part of what helped Amazon navigate the dot com bubble crisis in the early two thousands. Anyway, both of those articles are well worth your time and you should check those out. That's it for the news this week. I'll chat with you next week, probably about large language model collapse and how AI training itself on other AI ultimately leads to a desolate landscape of garbage content that's fun to talk about. We'll chat about that next week, as well as some other stuff. And I hope you have a fantastic weekend, 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.