Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland, and I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech are you? It's time for the tech News for a Thursday, August tenth, twenty twenty three. First up, I've got a short update on the Epic versus Apple legal saga. So for people who aren't up to speed, Epic is the company that makes the insanely popular game Fortnite. That game is available on a lot of platforms, including Apple's iOS. Fortnite's revenue depends heavily on in app purchases, but Apple has this pesky policy in that Apple takes a healthy chunk between fifteen to thirty percent of every in app transaction. Epic, in an attempt to circumvent those rules and to keep more of the money for themselves, urged players on iOS to make transactions outside of the app that would then be applied to their accounts in game. Apple objected to this workaround and removed Fortnite from its app store, and this started a big old legal battle between the companies, with Epic arguing that Apple's policies are predatory and they're anti competitive. Because Apple requires developers to use Apple's in house payment processing system for in app payments, you can't go anywhere else. This legal battle has gone back and forth over the last few years. Sometimes Epic makes some progress, sometimes Apple wins some progress. In California, Epic won a case where a judge ruled that Apple had been engaging in anti competitive practices and that the company should allow for alternative forms of payment. Apple then appealed that ruling to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and Apple partially won that case. One of the things that one was a stay on that specific part of the ruling, and that gave Apple three months to petition the Supreme Court to hear the case. Epic then appealed directly to the Supreme Court in an effort to negate the stay that the Ninth Court Circuit Court awarded, and Epic argued that otherwise allowing Apple to continue this practice would cause harm not just to Epic but to other developers as well as to consumers. The Supreme Court denied epics plea to negate the stay, so the stay remains in place. Now, I guess we have to wait and see if the Supreme Court will hear out the actual Apple versus Epic case. Also, while Apple has budged a bit on its policy about having to use Apple's payment systems in other places, the company reserves the right to charge a commission on payments that are outside of its own in house system. So, in other words, Apple still is pointing to a cut of every transaction even if you're not using Apple's own payments system. Sometimes that cut means that it actually ends up being more expensive to use an alternative than to use Apple, which I'm sure is going to initiate a lot more court cases because that still sounds anti competitive as all get out to my ears. On Tuesday, Nvidia announced that its new GH two hundred chip is going to be ideal for companies that are in the AI sector, especially ones that are building out things like large language models. The GH two hundred combines the same GPU chip as the H one hundred, which is like the flagship chip that Nvidia makes for the AI industry right now, but this one also pairs with it a seventy two core ARMS central processor seventy two cores and also a whopping one hundred and forty one gigabytes of memory. That's insane. The chip are going to start shipping next year, maybe second quarter. I don't often talk about the hardware side of the AI boom. I talk a lot about the models and stuff, but not necessarily the underlying hardware. But you have to understand it is companies like Nvidia that are making that hardware viable right that it's creating a market for AI hardware, and it's really enabling the AI boom in many ways because more companies can have access to the actual circuitry used to run this and not just rely upon cloud based strategies that kind of thing. So yeah, I should probably do a full episode about the underlying hardware that is powering the AI revolution. The White House is increasing restrictions on US investments into Chinese tech companies, specifically ones that are in the AI, high tech, chip, and quantum computing sectors. Those three sectors in partic This executive order will actually go into effect next year and will require American companies to disclose investments in these Chinese sectors. Now, previously the US has banned exports of American tech to China. Now we're seeing kind of a similar move covering investment into Chinese tech companies. The Biden administration sites concerns over national security as the motivation for these bands. China's Commerce Ministry has denounced this strategy. The ministry says that it quote deviates from the principles of fair competition and the market economy that the US consistently advocates end quote, And I mean, I think that's true. I think it does like it does seem to fly in the face of the general market velosophy of the United States. However, we also have to acknowledge that China has backed countless hacker groups and attacks against US companies and government agencies, and China has infiltrated systems left, right and center in the United States and in other places. So there's definitely an element of self preservation going on here. It's not just a case of we're treating you unfairly. It's we're being attacked and we're trying to find ways to mitigate that. Now, a lot of critics are saying, this actually isn't that likely to affect China that much, because it's not like China has a shortage of access to money to fund these kind of things. And there are other investors around the world who seem to be a little reluctant to acquiesce to a ban on investing in such Chinese technologies. But this is going to have a big impact on venture firms and private equity groups here in the United States that we're hoping to make some serious bank while backing Chinese tech initiatives. Dan Ackerman, the editor in chief of Gizmoto and the author of a book titled The Tetris Effect, is soon Apple, the Tetris company, and the filmmakers behind the movie Tetris, which is an Apple TV Plus film. Apple produced it. Ackerman is claiming that the filmmakers have plagiarized his work, that screenwriter Noah Pink adapted Ackerman's book without his permission and without compensation. And this gets tricky because both the movie and the book are detailing the real world events that led to Tetris emerging from the then Soviet Union to become a global phenomenon, and how a Dutch American businessman played a pivotal role in that story. This is a real world story, so it's been told multiple times. It's not like Ackerman was the first person to write about this. Now that being said, Ackerman argues that the film contextualizes the story as if it were like a Cold War era thriller, which his book also did. So he says, it's not just that we're both telling the same story, it's that we're telling it the same way, and his lawsuit lists twenty two points of similarity between his book and the film's screenplay or the film itself. Ackerman also alleges that the Tetris Company and its CEO, Maya Rodgers, denied Ackerman's attempts to secure film and TV rights to his book by denying him the use of the Tetris license. So, in other words, he couldn't end up, you know, having the film rights or TV rights to his story because Tetris would not allow him to license the IP at all. And how do you tell the story that way? This kind of feels similar to me to the recent film The Beanie Bubble. That's where we got the story behind the people who created beanie babies, but the film didn't manage to land a license to actually show beanie babies in the movie, so they have stand ins instead. There are no actual beanie babies in the Beanie bubble film. It's really weird anyway. Ackerman says that the Tetris company stonewalled his own attempts to have his work adapted into a film and simultaneously used his book as source material for a movie of their own. So he is seeking around five million dollars. And this might not be an open and shutcase even with those points of similarity, because the people that the stories about happened to be the producers of the movie, right like the people that are the the the protagonists of this story are producing the film. So there could be a very valid argument to make that they were the source of all the information used in the screenplay and that they were also the principal sources for Akerman, and that the argument is that the story wasn't taken from Akerman, The story was taken from the people who experienced it, and they just happened to be the source for both works. That could be the argument we see. Although if Akerman is able to argue that the presentation of the story is the way it is because of his book, then I think he's got a fairly solid case. It's just this is a tough situation. We'll have to see if the court allows all the blocks to fall into place, or if this is one of those cases where you accidentally drop that S shape block in the wrong spot and really mess things up for yourself. Okay, we're going to take a quick break and we'll be back with some more news stories. US regulatory agencies are coming down hard on nearly a dozen financial institutions relying on so called off channel messaging apps to conduct financial deals, you know, like discussing trades and that kind of thing. And that is a big no note because some of these messaging apps they don't keep a log of messages, and the financial sector is heavily regulated, so these kinds of deals aren't allowed to happen off the books. That would be illegal. Everything is supposed to be well documented and preserved, and the nature of these apps makes that impossible. So in total, the regulators hit eleven financial institutions with more than half a billion dollars in fines. If you're curious, the one that was hit hardest was Wells. Fargo SEC hit them for one hundred and twenty five million dollars, and the Commodity Futures Training Commission hit them for another seventy five million dollars. On top of that, the regulators say that the violations occurred at all different levels within these financial institutions. This wasn't a case of like some new hire not understanding that they can't use watts app to talk about big trades. It was all through different levels, including supervisors, managers, leadership, that kind of stuff. So big o' yikes. Saudi Arabia has followed the EU's lead when it comes to mandating a USB C charging port on smartphones moving forward. You may recall that the EU ruled on this matter not too long ago, and that's going to necessitate companies like Apple to migrate away from proprietary ports, in Apple's case, the lightning port, in order to adopt the USBC standard, and this would make charging ports universal across the EU and then obviously across Saudi Arabia. Now, so the philosophy behind this is that it helps cut way down on e waste because you would go out, you'd buy a phone, and you would buy a USBC charging cable, and you could still use that same cable even as you upgrade your phone over the years, even if you switch models and brands of phones. At least until some new charging standard would replace USBC, or maybe you need to buy a new USBC cable because your old one no longer works, or it needs to be upgraded to a new standard that is more powerful. But I can get behind this. I often think back to when I have had a whole bunch of different digital gadgets, like you know, like a standalone camera and an MP three player and a smartphone and all this kind of stuff, and all of them had their own charging ports and cables, and if you misplaced one of them, you were out of lock. You would have to go out and buy a replacement, and often those were way overpriced because you didn't have options, so you had to buy the official one and obg like ridiculously expensive. By adopting a standard, consumers can purchase a cable from whichever merchant and manufacturer they like and it should work just fine because it's a standard. Saudi Arabia's law takes effect January first, twenty twenty five. It's widely believed that Apple's iPhone fifteen will have a USB C charging port, not because of Saudi Arabia, but certainly the EU would have been a big part of that, and according to Apple, Insider. There were even rumors that Apple had planned to incorporate technology that would throttle both data transfer speeds and charging speed if users were going to plug in a USBC cable that was not Apple certified. So in other words, yes, Apple would use a standard, but it would throttle any standard cable that wasn't Apple certified, and that would artificially inhibit that cable's performance. But the EU lawmakers have now said, if you do that, we ban iPhone sales in the EU because the EU does not play around with this stuff. Gizmodo has an article by Thomas Jermaine titled c neet deletes thousands of old articles to game Google Search. I think that article is worth a read, but I'm actually going to go into it a little bit here, so it's not just a recommendation. The name of the game here is SEO, which, in case you're not familiar with that initialism, that's search engine optimization. This is an umbrella term for strategies that are meant to improve a website's ranking in search results, primarily Google search results, but it can apply to other search engines as well. So SEO, when you really boil it down, is all about figuring out what a search algorithm actually values. You're kind of reverse engineering the approach to the algorithm uses in order to rank search results, and then you apply what you've learned to your own website so that you can boost your websites appearance in search results. For example, maybe you notice that trends are showing an increase in searches around a particular topic, so you might rush to create a page centered on that topic and then use lots of stuff like links to and from that page to help boost its performance. Gizmodo's report is about how c net has been removing articles like thousands of them over the past several months, and that this is a case of c net attempting to prune material that could otherwise be dragging the site as a whole down in search results. So the thought is that older articles get very little traffic and that they could be hurting the c net's rankings and search overall. Because if Google's search algorithm says, oh, not very many people are going to this site when you take into account all the different web pages, then it must not be very good, so we're going to rank it lower. That's kind of the thought here. So the idea is that you remove this dead weight, you know, you cut the anchor away from you, and the remaining pages on your website have better traffic and better engagement, and that means you rank better in search results. That's the thinking. Google, by the way, denies that this is the way it works, but then SEO experts say, no, this is part of how it works. Google just doesn't want you to go out there and start blasting out old articles in an effort to game the system, which is what people are saying c net is doing. I actually suspect that how Stuff Works has done this in the past. I don't have any proof on that, just other than I've had trouble finding my own articles on that site, and I wrote for them for like a decade, so it's it's a little weird that I can't find very much many articles that I've written on there, although maybe they just updated them and removed my byline. I don't know. But yeah, it's kind of a bummer because it means that people who have been writing have lost a lot of their portfolio of work that they could show off to other people. And it just is kind of depressing to see that you know, creative types like yours truly have to remember the stuff we make isn't even at all permanent, which makes me wonder why I'm even doing this. Okay, wait, i gotta step out of it. I've got a couple more stories to get through, all right. So Disney is getting ready to hike prices for its streaming services again. It's starting to get a bit ridiculous with the number of services and options within those services. But here we go. For those subscribe to the ads supported tiers for Disney Plus Hulu or Disney Plus and Hulu, there's no change. The monthly fee is going to stay exactly the same. But if you want the no ads version of Disney Plus, that's going from ten ninety nine per month to thirty teen ninety nine per month starting October twelfth. If you're going ad free on Hulu, that goes from fourteen ninety nine per month to seventeen ninety nine per month. And if you want both of them with no ads, you can opt in for a new tier called Duo Premium that launches in early September. That one is nineteen ninety nine per month, or hey, you could go Duo Basic that's Disney Plus and Hulu with ads. That's nine ninety nine per month. That's kind of why it is right now, Oh, sports fans, there are options for you too. ESPN Plus with ADS is going to be ten ninety nine per month, But if you wanted to lump that into Disney Plus and Hulu packages, well you could go basic. That means all the platforms are ADS supported. That combined package will cost you fourteen ninety nine per month. Or you could go AD free on Hulu and AD free on Disney Plus. However, ESPN Plus is still AD supported, that ends up being twenty four ninety nine a month. There are other options too. There's ones where you can have live TV included, the ones where you can have a subscription to all UFC pay per views. In a year is a big old complicated mess, and just a quick reminder a little flashback back when Disney Plus first launched in twenty nineteen. You know how much that cost six ninety nine per month. It has doubled in price, or at least it will have come October. According to multiple sources. Disney is also following in Netflix's footsteps, and by that I mean exploring ways to eliminate password sharing among households. Finally, you might remember that last year NASA tested out a method that could be used to divert an asteroid on an impact trajectory with Earth. They were slamming a spacecraft into it. They did that with an asteroid called Dimorphose, which was in orbit around another asteroid called Didamus, not on a collision course with Earth. This was just a test, and now an astronomer team led by David Jewett have discovered that apparently that impact caused boulders to eject off the surface of Dimorphose. And the problem with that is that if we were to use this method on an incoming asteroid, what we might end up with is instead of one big asteroid coming at us, we might have a whole bunch of smaller bodies of rock flying at us. So it's kind of like going from a cannonball to buckshot, or, as Jewett has says, shrapnel from a hand grenade. This is why the plan and Armageddon wouldn't have worked, y'all. That documentary was so wrong. But yeah, you can't just blow it up. You would just end up with the same amount of mass just spread out some And yeah, maybe some of the smaller pieces would burn up on entry into the Earth's atmosphere, but others would make it down and potentially cause massive amounts of damage. So this could mean that we have to reevaluate that particular methodology when it comes to diverting a near Earth object's trajectory. If it's coming our way, it may be that slamming something into it isn't the we need, but a lot more work has to be done before we can come to that determination. It is interesting, though. All Right, that's it. I hope you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland, and I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech are you? It's time for the tech News for a Thursday, August tenth, twenty twenty three. First up, I've got a short update on the Epic versus Apple legal saga. So for people who aren't up to speed, Epic is the company that makes the insanely popular game Fortnite. That game is available on a lot of platforms, including Apple's iOS. Fortnite's revenue depends heavily on in app purchases, but Apple has this pesky policy in that Apple takes a healthy chunk between fifteen to thirty percent of every in app transaction. Epic, in an attempt to circumvent those rules and to keep more of the money for themselves, urged players on iOS to make transactions outside of the app that would then be applied to their accounts in game. Apple objected to this workaround and removed Fortnite from its app store, and this started a big old legal battle between the companies, with Epic arguing that Apple's policies are predatory and they're anti competitive. Because Apple requires developers to use Apple's in house payment processing system for in app payments, you can't go anywhere else. This legal battle has gone back and forth over the last few years. Sometimes Epic makes some progress, sometimes Apple wins some progress. In California, Epic won a case where a judge ruled that Apple had been engaging in anti competitive practices and that the company should allow for alternative forms of payment. Apple then appealed that ruling to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and Apple partially won that case. One of the things that one was a stay on that specific part of the ruling, and that gave Apple three months to petition the Supreme Court to hear the case. Epic then appealed directly to the Supreme Court in an effort to negate the stay that the Ninth Court Circuit Court awarded, and Epic argued that otherwise allowing Apple to continue this practice would cause harm not just to Epic but to other developers as well as to consumers. The Supreme Court denied epics plea to negate the stay, so the stay remains in place. Now, I guess we have to wait and see if the Supreme Court will hear out the actual Apple versus Epic case. Also, while Apple has budged a bit on its policy about having to use Apple's payment systems in other places, the company reserves the right to charge a commission on payments that are outside of its own in house system. So, in other words, Apple still is pointing to a cut of every transaction even if you're not using Apple's own payments system. Sometimes that cut means that it actually ends up being more expensive to use an alternative than to use Apple, which I'm sure is going to initiate a lot more court cases because that still sounds anti competitive as all get out to my ears. On Tuesday, Nvidia announced that its new GH two hundred chip is going to be ideal for companies that are in the AI sector, especially ones that are building out things like large language models. The GH two hundred combines the same GPU chip as the H one hundred, which is like the flagship chip that Nvidia makes for the AI industry right now, but this one also pairs with it a seventy two core ARMS central processor seventy two cores and also a whopping one hundred and forty one gigabytes of memory. That's insane. The chip are going to start shipping next year, maybe second quarter. I don't often talk about the hardware side of the AI boom. I talk a lot about the models and stuff, but not necessarily the underlying hardware. But you have to understand it is companies like Nvidia that are making that hardware viable right that it's creating a market for AI hardware, and it's really enabling the AI boom in many ways because more companies can have access to the actual circuitry used to run this and not just rely upon cloud based strategies that kind of thing. So yeah, I should probably do a full episode about the underlying hardware that is powering the AI revolution. The White House is increasing restrictions on US investments into Chinese tech companies, specifically ones that are in the AI, high tech, chip, and quantum computing sectors. Those three sectors in partic This executive order will actually go into effect next year and will require American companies to disclose investments in these Chinese sectors. Now, previously the US has banned exports of American tech to China. Now we're seeing kind of a similar move covering investment into Chinese tech companies. The Biden administration sites concerns over national security as the motivation for these bands. China's Commerce Ministry has denounced this strategy. The ministry says that it quote deviates from the principles of fair competition and the market economy that the US consistently advocates end quote, And I mean, I think that's true. I think it does like it does seem to fly in the face of the general market velosophy of the United States. However, we also have to acknowledge that China has backed countless hacker groups and attacks against US companies and government agencies, and China has infiltrated systems left, right and center in the United States and in other places. So there's definitely an element of self preservation going on here. It's not just a case of we're treating you unfairly. It's we're being attacked and we're trying to find ways to mitigate that. Now, a lot of critics are saying, this actually isn't that likely to affect China that much, because it's not like China has a shortage of access to money to fund these kind of things. And there are other investors around the world who seem to be a little reluctant to acquiesce to a ban on investing in such Chinese technologies. But this is going to have a big impact on venture firms and private equity groups here in the United States that we're hoping to make some serious bank while backing Chinese tech initiatives. Dan Ackerman, the editor in chief of Gizmoto and the author of a book titled The Tetris Effect, is soon Apple, the Tetris company, and the filmmakers behind the movie Tetris, which is an Apple TV Plus film. Apple produced it. Ackerman is claiming that the filmmakers have plagiarized his work, that screenwriter Noah Pink adapted Ackerman's book without his permission and without compensation. And this gets tricky because both the movie and the book are detailing the real world events that led to Tetris emerging from the then Soviet Union to become a global phenomenon, and how a Dutch American businessman played a pivotal role in that story. This is a real world story, so it's been told multiple times. It's not like Ackerman was the first person to write about this. Now that being said, Ackerman argues that the film contextualizes the story as if it were like a Cold War era thriller, which his book also did. So he says, it's not just that we're both telling the same story, it's that we're telling it the same way, and his lawsuit lists twenty two points of similarity between his book and the film's screenplay or the film itself. Ackerman also alleges that the Tetris Company and its CEO, Maya Rodgers, denied Ackerman's attempts to secure film and TV rights to his book by denying him the use of the Tetris license. So, in other words, he couldn't end up, you know, having the film rights or TV rights to his story because Tetris would not allow him to license the IP at all. And how do you tell the story that way? This kind of feels similar to me to the recent film The Beanie Bubble. That's where we got the story behind the people who created beanie babies, but the film didn't manage to land a license to actually show beanie babies in the movie, so they have stand ins instead. There are no actual beanie babies in the Beanie bubble film. It's really weird anyway. Ackerman says that the Tetris company stonewalled his own attempts to have his work adapted into a film and simultaneously used his book as source material for a movie of their own. So he is seeking around five million dollars. And this might not be an open and shutcase even with those points of similarity, because the people that the stories about happened to be the producers of the movie, right like the people that are the the the protagonists of this story are producing the film. So there could be a very valid argument to make that they were the source of all the information used in the screenplay and that they were also the principal sources for Akerman, and that the argument is that the story wasn't taken from Akerman, The story was taken from the people who experienced it, and they just happened to be the source for both works. That could be the argument we see. Although if Akerman is able to argue that the presentation of the story is the way it is because of his book, then I think he's got a fairly solid case. It's just this is a tough situation. We'll have to see if the court allows all the blocks to fall into place, or if this is one of those cases where you accidentally drop that S shape block in the wrong spot and really mess things up for yourself. Okay, we're going to take a quick break and we'll be back with some more news stories. US regulatory agencies are coming down hard on nearly a dozen financial institutions relying on so called off channel messaging apps to conduct financial deals, you know, like discussing trades and that kind of thing. And that is a big no note because some of these messaging apps they don't keep a log of messages, and the financial sector is heavily regulated, so these kinds of deals aren't allowed to happen off the books. That would be illegal. Everything is supposed to be well documented and preserved, and the nature of these apps makes that impossible. So in total, the regulators hit eleven financial institutions with more than half a billion dollars in fines. If you're curious, the one that was hit hardest was Wells. Fargo SEC hit them for one hundred and twenty five million dollars, and the Commodity Futures Training Commission hit them for another seventy five million dollars. On top of that, the regulators say that the violations occurred at all different levels within these financial institutions. This wasn't a case of like some new hire not understanding that they can't use watts app to talk about big trades. It was all through different levels, including supervisors, managers, leadership, that kind of stuff. So big o' yikes. Saudi Arabia has followed the EU's lead when it comes to mandating a USB C charging port on smartphones moving forward. You may recall that the EU ruled on this matter not too long ago, and that's going to necessitate companies like Apple to migrate away from proprietary ports, in Apple's case, the lightning port, in order to adopt the USBC standard, and this would make charging ports universal across the EU and then obviously across Saudi Arabia. Now, so the philosophy behind this is that it helps cut way down on e waste because you would go out, you'd buy a phone, and you would buy a USBC charging cable, and you could still use that same cable even as you upgrade your phone over the years, even if you switch models and brands of phones. At least until some new charging standard would replace USBC, or maybe you need to buy a new USBC cable because your old one no longer works, or it needs to be upgraded to a new standard that is more powerful. But I can get behind this. I often think back to when I have had a whole bunch of different digital gadgets, like you know, like a standalone camera and an MP three player and a smartphone and all this kind of stuff, and all of them had their own charging ports and cables, and if you misplaced one of them, you were out of lock. You would have to go out and buy a replacement, and often those were way overpriced because you didn't have options, so you had to buy the official one and obg like ridiculously expensive. By adopting a standard, consumers can purchase a cable from whichever merchant and manufacturer they like and it should work just fine because it's a standard. Saudi Arabia's law takes effect January first, twenty twenty five. It's widely believed that Apple's iPhone fifteen will have a USB C charging port, not because of Saudi Arabia, but certainly the EU would have been a big part of that, and according to Apple, Insider. There were even rumors that Apple had planned to incorporate technology that would throttle both data transfer speeds and charging speed if users were going to plug in a USBC cable that was not Apple certified. So in other words, yes, Apple would use a standard, but it would throttle any standard cable that wasn't Apple certified, and that would artificially inhibit that cable's performance. But the EU lawmakers have now said, if you do that, we ban iPhone sales in the EU because the EU does not play around with this stuff. Gizmodo has an article by Thomas Jermaine titled c neet deletes thousands of old articles to game Google Search. I think that article is worth a read, but I'm actually going to go into it a little bit here, so it's not just a recommendation. The name of the game here is SEO, which, in case you're not familiar with that initialism, that's search engine optimization. This is an umbrella term for strategies that are meant to improve a website's ranking in search results, primarily Google search results, but it can apply to other search engines as well. So SEO, when you really boil it down, is all about figuring out what a search algorithm actually values. You're kind of reverse engineering the approach to the algorithm uses in order to rank search results, and then you apply what you've learned to your own website so that you can boost your websites appearance in search results. For example, maybe you notice that trends are showing an increase in searches around a particular topic, so you might rush to create a page centered on that topic and then use lots of stuff like links to and from that page to help boost its performance. Gizmodo's report is about how c net has been removing articles like thousands of them over the past several months, and that this is a case of c net attempting to prune material that could otherwise be dragging the site as a whole down in search results. So the thought is that older articles get very little traffic and that they could be hurting the c net's rankings and search overall. Because if Google's search algorithm says, oh, not very many people are going to this site when you take into account all the different web pages, then it must not be very good, so we're going to rank it lower. That's kind of the thought here. So the idea is that you remove this dead weight, you know, you cut the anchor away from you, and the remaining pages on your website have better traffic and better engagement, and that means you rank better in search results. That's the thinking. Google, by the way, denies that this is the way it works, but then SEO experts say, no, this is part of how it works. Google just doesn't want you to go out there and start blasting out old articles in an effort to game the system, which is what people are saying c net is doing. I actually suspect that how Stuff Works has done this in the past. I don't have any proof on that, just other than I've had trouble finding my own articles on that site, and I wrote for them for like a decade, so it's it's a little weird that I can't find very much many articles that I've written on there, although maybe they just updated them and removed my byline. I don't know. But yeah, it's kind of a bummer because it means that people who have been writing have lost a lot of their portfolio of work that they could show off to other people. And it just is kind of depressing to see that you know, creative types like yours truly have to remember the stuff we make isn't even at all permanent, which makes me wonder why I'm even doing this. Okay, wait, i gotta step out of it. I've got a couple more stories to get through, all right. So Disney is getting ready to hike prices for its streaming services again. It's starting to get a bit ridiculous with the number of services and options within those services. But here we go. For those subscribe to the ads supported tiers for Disney Plus Hulu or Disney Plus and Hulu, there's no change. The monthly fee is going to stay exactly the same. But if you want the no ads version of Disney Plus, that's going from ten ninety nine per month to thirty teen ninety nine per month starting October twelfth. If you're going ad free on Hulu, that goes from fourteen ninety nine per month to seventeen ninety nine per month. And if you want both of them with no ads, you can opt in for a new tier called Duo Premium that launches in early September. That one is nineteen ninety nine per month, or hey, you could go Duo Basic that's Disney Plus and Hulu with ads. That's nine ninety nine per month. That's kind of why it is right now, Oh, sports fans, there are options for you too. ESPN Plus with ADS is going to be ten ninety nine per month, But if you wanted to lump that into Disney Plus and Hulu packages, well you could go basic. That means all the platforms are ADS supported. That combined package will cost you fourteen ninety nine per month. Or you could go AD free on Hulu and AD free on Disney Plus. However, ESPN Plus is still AD supported, that ends up being twenty four ninety nine a month. There are other options too. There's ones where you can have live TV included, the ones where you can have a subscription to all UFC pay per views. In a year is a big old complicated mess, and just a quick reminder a little flashback back when Disney Plus first launched in twenty nineteen. You know how much that cost six ninety nine per month. It has doubled in price, or at least it will have come October. According to multiple sources. Disney is also following in Netflix's footsteps, and by that I mean exploring ways to eliminate password sharing among households. Finally, you might remember that last year NASA tested out a method that could be used to divert an asteroid on an impact trajectory with Earth. They were slamming a spacecraft into it. They did that with an asteroid called Dimorphose, which was in orbit around another asteroid called Didamus, not on a collision course with Earth. This was just a test, and now an astronomer team led by David Jewett have discovered that apparently that impact caused boulders to eject off the surface of Dimorphose. And the problem with that is that if we were to use this method on an incoming asteroid, what we might end up with is instead of one big asteroid coming at us, we might have a whole bunch of smaller bodies of rock flying at us. So it's kind of like going from a cannonball to buckshot, or, as Jewett has says, shrapnel from a hand grenade. This is why the plan and Armageddon wouldn't have worked, y'all. That documentary was so wrong. But yeah, you can't just blow it up. You would just end up with the same amount of mass just spread out some And yeah, maybe some of the smaller pieces would burn up on entry into the Earth's atmosphere, but others would make it down and potentially cause massive amounts of damage. So this could mean that we have to reevaluate that particular methodology when it comes to diverting a near Earth object's trajectory. If it's coming our way, it may be that slamming something into it isn't the we need, but a lot more work has to be done before we can come to that determination. It is interesting, though. All Right, that's it. 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.