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Tech News: The FCC Says Net Neutrality is Back on the Menu

Published Sep 26, 2023, 9:10 PM

During the administration of Barack Obama, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) tried to codify net neutrality into US law. Then, during the Trump administration, the new FCC stripped net neutrality out again. This week, the FCC once again tries to establish an official US stance on net neutrality. Plus more news!

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Be 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 September twenty sixth, twenty twenty three, and I am still in Las Vegas, still recording from a hotel room. Interesting thing for a Thursday's episode, it'll be a different hotel, so a different hotel room. We'll see how how that sounds. But never mind that, let's get to the tech news. And first up here in the United States, we've got this agency called the Federal Communications Commission aka the FCC. The FCC consists of five commissioners when it's a full commission, So for more than two and a half years, the FCC has only had four commissioners, two who fall on the Democrat ideological side and to who fall on the Republican ideological side, which meant getting consensus on anything was we'll call it a challenge. But earlier this month, the US Senate approved candidate and A Gomez to the position of commissioner, which means she will hold that position for five years. Gomez also falls on the Democrat side of ideology. This week, the FCC will once again tackle the issue of net neutrality. Now, for those of y'all who are unfamiliar with that particular term, net neutrality means a few things, but essentially it gets down to the fact that Internet service providers or ISPs, should treat all traffic on the Internet equally, and further that it should mean that anyone could access all Internet content with any Internet capable device, no matter what ISP they connect to. Much of the concern about net neutrality is on how imps have a lot of power, and they could potentially allow some Internet traffic to travel on a so called fast lane while throttling traffic coming from other places. And since some ISPs like Comcast are actually part of a multi billion dollar conglomerate that also includes companies that actually, you know, make content, there's this concern that they could show favoritism. Right, So, a firm net neutrality policy would keep Comcast from, say, throttling content that came from competitors while giving its own content preferential treatment to its Internet customers. Now, there's a whole lot more to the issue other than what I've just covered, but that's kind of a high level look at it. Well, back when Barack Obama was US president, the FCC created a whole bunch of new rules to try and ensure net neutrality, But then under the administration of Donald Trump, the FCC essentially stripped away those rules and them aside. Ajitpi, who was then the head of the FCC, claimed that net neutrality was trying to fix a problem that didn't really exist, and that keeping net neutrality away would mean that ISPs would feel free to invest heavily in innovation. We also found out that when the FCC opened up its proposed policy for public comment, which is part of FCC's process, the ISPs spend a whole lot of money to have more than eight million fake comments come out against net neutrality to the FCC's website. So they were stuffing the ballot boxes effectively with fake comments, trying to protect their own self interest. Now, I will say two things here. One, a lot of the fears about what will happen if you don't ensure net neutrality have not yet come to pass. We do not see an Internet that has this vast difference in data speeds depending upon which ISP you're connected to and what content you're trying to act access. That hasn't really happened, So the fearful worst case scenario hasn't happened. However, we also have not seen ISPs spend a whole lot of money in innovation because they have no incentive to do so. In most places in the United States, you have very little competition, if any, for Internet service providers. Well, without competition, there's not really any need to invest in innovation. You could just use that money to return toward shareholder value. So why would you spend that money innovating if there's no alternative to your service? I mean, no one's going to go anywhere else. But yeah, as to the whole stuffing the ballot box thing, that was a serious problem. In fact, according to an investigation, around eighteen million out of the twenty two million comments that were posted to the FCC were fake. Yikes. So anyway, I guess you could say they were innovative in the way they gained the system. But now it looks like we're going back to establishing net neutrality rules again. The process is a methought one, and after seeing the previous round of changes that happened when one administration replaced another. I imagine a lot of folks are wondering just how permanent any changes would be, Like, are we just going to see this flip flop depending upon which party has majority in the FCC at any given time, because that just gets frustrating. It means that you never really meet a parody or an equilibrium. It's just constantly flopping to favor one side versus the other. So we'll have to see. Imagine a lot of folks are just kind of fed up with the whole thing. It is progressively harder to argue, at least with any authority, that the Internet is not a necessary component in telecommunications, at least in my opinion. I mean, the pandemic really brought that to light that if you did not have access to the Internet, you were at a incredible social disadvantage. In fact, in some ways, you could not participate at all in modern systems. There are schools that use Internet or related stuff in the curriculum, and without access to that, students cannot participate in the education system. So I think it is high time that we define Internet access as a necessity, whether that's by defining it as utility or not. I don't know, but we'll have to see. In an earlier tech News episode, I talked about how a bill in California would require trucking companies that wanted to use autonomous trucks to have a human operator behind the wheel at all times while driving in California. Now that bill had wide support in the state legislation, only a few of California state legislators actually voted against it. Almost all of them voted for it. So it then went to the governor's desk, and the Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, did what everyone expected him to do, and he vetoed the bill. He said that current regulations are already fine when it comes to providing oversight to heavy duty autonomous vehicles, that the DMV will make these determinations, so there's no new legislation that is necessary, and there's a ton of debate on this issue. Honestly, I feel like I would need to dive in much more deeply to get a handle on all of it. Only a little of the debate actually deals with the tech itself, and I think it is safe for us to say that autonomous vehicle technology still has a long way to go before it reaches a level of reliability and safety that we could say is dependable. But the actual debate rests on tons of other factors like politics and money and jobs, and those are what are really causing some figurative roadblocks. A ransomware hacker group says that it has infiltrated quote unquote all Sony systems. Now, from what I've seen, there's a lot of doubt out there as to how far into Sony's systems the hackers were actually able to get. Most of the reporting I've seen has suggested that it wasn't really that far. It certainly wasn't everything, at least from what we can tell so far, but there is a general agreement that hacker did infiltrate some Sony systems and gained some level of access. The group says it will sell the data that they stole from Sony on the dark web. They have indicated that Sony leadership refused to hand over a ransom to the group, so this is the second method for them to get money from their wicked deeds. That group, by the way, is called Ransomed dot VC. According to the cybersecurity company cyber Security Connect, the security company also said that the evidence presented suggests that the intrusion was somewhat limited, but it's possible that some of the files that were listed could contain really sensitive information, like it could have business info or customer data. It's hard to say. Ransom dot VC presents itself as some sort of gray hat hacker group. They claim to conduct penetration testing, and that's a real thing. The way penetration and testing usually works is that you have a company and you've got a computer system and you want to see, you know, if your computer system's security is robust or not, so you hire some hackers. Usually it's some sort of consulting group, and the hackers are meant to probe your systems and look for vulnerabilities. Then they share their findings, you can improve your security wherever you need to, and the cycle goes on. That way, you'd do this over and over again. But what ransom dot VC does is it probes company systems without being invited to do it. Then if they gain access, they quote unquote seek compensation for our professional services, which really is just saying we broke into your house and now we demand you pay us for all the stuff we took because we taught you that your home security is not very good. It's not a very sincere or convincing argument, if you ask me. An Amazon executive who is leaving the company told Bloomberg that he expects the high costs of running AI operations mean that Amazon will one day charge customers to use the Alexa voice activated assystem now. He clarified that he thinks the tool as it exists right now will remain free, that there will be a basic free level of service, but that Amazon will one day release a more advanced version with better features and one that you would have to pay for. He also said this is likely not that far off, and that the payment would be framed, probably as a subscription service. I think that approach actually makes the most sense. If Amazon were to suddenly tell its customers that the tool they've been using for free for several years now is going to switch to becoming a subscription service, that would not go over super well. But introducing a new premiere version might not be such a hard sell, and there is no getting around it. Powering AI is expensive. It requires a lot of compute power or requires a lot of electricity, so there are some real costs to running AI services. So I get what he's saying. I don't think it's that shocking. I think the headline of Amazon exec says Amazon will one day charge for Alexa. I think that's just a big attention grabber. Okay, I've got some more news items to cover in just a moment, but first let's take a quick break. We're back. So the US Securities Exchange Commission or SEC, is continuing its probe into personal communications among various employees and executives at major investment companies. So here's the deal. Here in the United States, we've got a lot of obfuscation when it comes to how money rolls around in the investment world. I mean, there's so many ways that investments can be hidden away, but even that has its limits. Like as dark as it can get, there are limitations, and there are rules that you're supposed to follow, and one of those is that business communications within and between investment companies are supposed to be documented. That is a rule. But over the last several years, some folks at these companies have taken to using certain personal communication tools like Signal and WhatsApp that are by design not transparent. Now, for the purposes of protected communication. That's actually great. You want these tools to be reliable. You do not want them to be transparent. You want people to be able to communicate privately with each other without worry about surveillance. All of that is cool, But when it comes to official business among these giant investment companies, it's a big no no. Several big companies have already had to fork over substantial cash in fines. Back in August, the sec find eleven companies collectively the princely sum of two hundred and eighty nine million dollars. Now that was divided up among the eleven wells. Fargo had to pay the most out of those eleven companies. Its share of that fear was one hundred and twenty five million dollars. Yikes. And actually that's an improvement over last year. SEC find ten companies about one point one billion dollars last year. So this is an ongoing issue, and again it just shows how tech can play a role in intrinsic systems that are not specifically tech related, but because of tech's involvement, it has a huge impact. The Ford Motor Company says it is pausing construction on a planned electric vehicle battery plant in Marshall, Michigan. Now this is happening the same time that there's a union auto workers strike going on, which critics say is not a coincidence. They argue that Ford is essentially threatening twenty five hundred jobs. That's the estimated number of positions that would be employed at this future battery plant, and they're doing it before they ever hire a single one of them. Now, there's a lot going on with this story, ranging from local resis csidents in Michigan opposing the plant for various reasons, including the fact that it would take up land that otherwise might be used for agriculture. There are also a lot of political debates. There's also a lot of just posturing, with various leaders coming out either in support of Ford's decision to delay the project or condemning the company for playing fast and loose while taxpayers are on the hook for paying these massive subsidies that made the deal possible in the first place. And then there's another political angle in the form of the battery components. A lot of those are coming out of China, so that's become a big thing about, oh, you're enabling the Communist Party in China by using these Chinese parts. The entire industry uses those parts. There isn't an American equivalent, or you know, an equivalent that's anywhere close to the same price range is what you get out of China. It'd be great if there were, and maybe there should be a lot more money and time spent building that up. That just doesn't exist right now. So a lot of this strikes me again more as posturing than anything else, which is infuriating, as so much hangs in the balance. I'll keep an eye out to see how temporary this pause actually ends up being. Reddit has announced a sort of contributor program to encourage a contributor economy on the platform. It's not that different from what we've seen implemented over at x formerly known as Twitter. So Reddit always had this sort of virtual currency, couple of them really, in the form of gold and karma. These weren't actually useful, but they did become something of a status symbol for some redditors. And now Reddit announced a program in which people can trade in their virtual currencies, their virtual points, for actual cash. At least here in the United States. They're rolling that out now. There are some parameters. First, anything post in not safe for work subreddits is off limits. So you can't just count on racking up tons of karma by posting photos of your booty and all the booty related subreddits. That's just not going to work. Karma will determine your status. Specifically, post karma will determine your status. Post karma is the karma you earn when people vote a new post to Reddit, but comment karma, where you're commenting on someone's post, that won't count. So if you leave a great comment on someone else's post and you get tons of up votes, that doesn't actually contribute to this particular program. It's only the things that you post to Reddit that's actually made people worry. That there's going to be a whole lot of reposting going on as a result of this. But that karma determines how much each of your Reddit gold will be worth in real money, and that gets paid out on a monthly basis. So if you have between one hundred and four nine and ninety nine karma, you get ninety cents for every gold that you've accumulated that month. If your karma is five thousand or higher, you get a whole dollar for each gold, So I suspect this is one of Reddit's strategies to try and get the Reddit community at large to kind of forget about how angry they've been about changes to reddits API. If you recall that effectively shut down several third party Reddit apps not too long ago. The question is will this work? Will it mollify Reddit users? I don't know. I do know that a lot of Reddit users already think what's going to do is make Reddit even worse, because they do worry that it's going to mean we're going to have a huge influx of repost bots that just take posts that were made in certain subredds and then post them in other subreddits. And so you just get this flood of the same material over and over again in an effort to game the system, and it won't do anything meaningfully good for the actual users on the platform. We'll have to see if that's how it rolls out. Apple is pushing out an update to an old phone in order to fix an issue in France. So this has to do with how much radio frequency radiation the iPhone twelve emits. Now, to be clear, there is no scientific evidence showing that radio frequency radiation is actually dangerous. It is different from nuclear radiation. Our f radiation isn't ionizing. It's not stripping electrons away from atoms or anything like that. It's not doing the damage that something like you know, nuclear radiation does. It can mean that your RF device, like your smartphone, can get a bit warmer if it does emit more RF radiation than say another device would, And that's about it anyway, just to be on the safe side. Lots of governments have rules as to how much RF radiation a consumer device can legally emit, and they're not supposed to go beyond that. Originally, the iPhone twelve fell within those parameters in France when it was an initially tested in France. But something has happened since the iPhone twelve came out three years ago. Now the RF emissions, according to French regulators, are above the restricted level. So Apple has scrambled to issue a software update that the company says, we'll fix this problem. So according to Apple, the devices have not mysteriously started to emit more RAF radiation. They're saying, actually, our phones haven't really changed, it's just the methodology that French regulators are using to measure it is at fault, but the software patch should fix things anyway. Apple certainly hopes that's the case at any rate, because the company otherwise would face a country wide recall situation for iPhone twelve owners and that would be expensive. Okay, I got a few more news items that I got to cover before we get to that. Let's take another quick break. So before the break has talked about the iPhone, let's talk about Android. Ours Technica reports that the upcoming Pixel eight smartphone from Google will actually receive seven years of OS support as well as security support. So that means if you purchase a Pixel eight, Google is guaranteeing that your phone will remain relevant and up to date for seven years. They're not going to abandon the device, you know, four or five years down the track. It may not be able to do everything that a Pixel seven years from now can do, like a brand new one, but that won't be due to lack of support. Instead would be due to limitations on the hardware itself. Right, Like, maybe the Pixel fifteen has a special three D camera that the Pixel eight doesn't have. Well, obviously, the Pixel eight can't just magically sprout a new camera, but it would get other OS updates to make it still work with you know apps of the time. This would put Google ahead of Apple when it comes to supporting hardware with OS updates. Earlier, the Pixel enjoyed just three years of OS support and five years of security patch support. Apple in the past few generations of iPhones has supported five to six years of OS updates. They don't have a defined, or at least not a publicly communicated support policy, so yeah, seven years is pretty significant, although I'm still having to wait to find out if the Pixel eight is going to have features that I think are interesting enough to merit an upgrade for myself. I'm still sporting a Pixel five myself. The game company, Blizzard has been hard at work adding in quality of life improvements to the game. Overwatch two, the team based competitive shooter, has had a pretty rough go of it. Blizzard changed course before releasing the game, and I had a lot of players that were left feeling that the game they got was a long way away from what they had been promised. But Blizzard has kept adding improvements into the game to create a better user experience, at least better if you're not a troll or a cheater. For example, the company has incorporated AI which will analyze voice chat between players. So if someone starts using abusive language or otherwise is using voice chat to disrupt the game, and AI system verifies that the behavior is in fact disruptive and then will issue a warning to that player in question. Blizzard says that for the vast majority of players, this results in an immediate correction of the behavior, that when they realize someone in charge is listening, they knock that crap off. Oh and Blizzard also says it has banned about a quarter of a million players for cheating Yauza, and the company is also targeting accounts that appear to team with known cheaters, and a lot of those folks are getting banned too. So even if you don't cheat, but you tend to play with cheaters a lot by association, you can get banned. I'm not sure that these moves have actually turned the harshest critics around, but the chatter I see among reviewers is that the game itself is pretty good. It just suffers from the fact that the company had made some promises it later chose to walk back. One thing that happened over the weekend is that the Earth got a delivery from space. The deliver was not door Dash or anything like that. It was a spacecraft called Osiris Rex, which we originally launched into space back in twenty sixteen. The spacecraft traveled to an asteroid named Binu, which I swear sounds like it came from a Star Wars movie. Anyway, Osiris Rex reached Bannu in twenty eighteen. Then it spent a couple of years flying around the asteroid just looking for the right spot to land and sample. In twenty twenty, the spacecraft landed on Banu scooped up a sample of material. It stored it inside a capsule that the spacecraft was carrying. It then launched off Banu in the spring of twenty twenty one and started its journey back home. It flew by Earth and released the capsule and then continued on its merry way to go to a different asteroid. So scientists retrieved the caps and they plan to study the material inside in an effort to learn more about the early Solar System and how it was formed and how it evolved, maybe even learning where the organic compounds that form the basis of life came from. Really cool stuff. I may need to do a full episode about this to talk about the extreme care NESSA has to take to avoid contaminating the sample before scientists can study it and search for those organic compounds. Now we're coming up on our last full story. It is a somewhat goofy story. There's this company called I don't know if it's supposed to be Dictator or Dictator Dictador. It's an alcohol company in Poland. It's known for producing and selling rum. And there's a new boss in town, a robot boss named Mica. So the robot is humanoid, as a mannequin like head. It's got a and eyeglasses. I'm not sure why a robot would need eyeglasses, unless the thought is it just makes it look smart, which makes it a very shallow robot. Anyway, according to the stories, Mica has artificial intelligence and Mica will serve as the quote unquote CEO of the company. However, this will involve significantly less than what your typical CEO tends to handle. Mica will mostly oversee the decentralized autonomous organization aka the TAO of this company is called art House Spirits. This will involve stuff like releasing NFTs and at this point you might be like me and thinking, Wow, sounds like Mica has already really missed the boat on this one because NFTs in particular and crypto related topics in general are not held in particular favor right now. Mika is also supposed to help the company's spot potential clients and design rum bottles. Don't know how Mica does that, Like, does the robot just wander around Poland and say, hey, you look like you like rum, why don't you drink ours away? When it comes to actual business decisions, it'll be a group of human executives will be calling those shots. So really, this comes to me it comes across as kind of like a mix between the Terminator and the Hudsucker proxy. If you don't get those references, you need to go and watch the movies. Finally, I have an article suggestion for y'all. It's from vox dot COM's A w Olheiser and the title of the article is gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do. And as I'm sure you've gathered, the article makes the case the gen Z users, you know, people who were born and raised after the Internet and the Web had become a thing are not particularly good at avoiding Internet based pitfalls. So the article asks some interesting questions, such as why is a digital native a generation that were born during this era and presumably one that's much more aware of cybersecurity practices, why are they really bad at actually using those practices? Personally, I think it really comes down to how much tech the younger generation uses, like how many apps they use and how frequently they are on their phones or other devices and are using these apps because the more you're using, the more points of vulnerability you could be opening up, right, So I don't think it's necessarily true that they are worse at cybersecurity than old folks like myself. So gen xer is like me, we should not be smug about this at all. If we old fogies use the same amount of tech as the young'ins do, I think we would probably be in a similar spot. So I don't think it's as simple as saying one generation is just more inherently bad at protecting themselves than others are. But that's my opinion, So check out the article to read up on the various hypotheses about the matter. I'm curious what y'all think and That is it for the Tech News for Tuesday, September twenty six, 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.

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