Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio. And how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for February twenty second, twenty twenty two, otherwise known as the date where you just start hitting the number two until it's March. Let's get to it. So, back during the Trump administration here in the United States, we saw the US government pressure the social network platform TikTok to sever ties with its Chinese parent company byte Dance, citing a concern that TikTok could be siphoning personal data from US citizens and sending that information back to China. Claimed that TikTok refuted at the time, and there were a lot of other issues that were tied up with this as well. It was just that it was this larger trade war between the US and China. But it turns out that a pair of studies kind of justifies those data concerns. A group of cybersecurity experts conducted studies that we're looking into TikTok's data collection practices and concluded that TikTok has been allowing byte Dance to have full access to user data on the platform. The security experts sent their findings to the news website The Rap and The Wrap then did a very responsible thing from journalism standpoint, They sought out other experts to independently confirm the findings, which they did. TikTok, as of this recording, has not yet responded to those reports. Further, the research suggests that TikTok engineers have found a way to sidestep code audits by both Google and Apple, which could also mean that TikTok could potentially change the code without folks really knowing about it, which brings up all sorts of issue is and it suggests that TikTok has found some loopholes that's exploiting while other platforms like say Facebook, continued to be buffeted by recent changes to IOSS privacy and data tracking settings. You might remember that was a big part of why Meta, the parent company to Facebook, had such a rough year last year. They lost out on an estimated ten billion dollars in revenue because Apple changed it's it's data tracking privacy settings. Now, according to those security experts, the TikTok application can even query things on whatever devices installed on so kind of similar to the data tracking issue, where it's not just tracking your activity within the the app itself, but other stuff you're doing on your down that same device. So essentially TikTok has been able to do what Facebook used to do but no longer can do, at least if you opt out. My guess is that China isn't so much spying on individual US citizens to build out you know, dossiers on everyone, but they're rather you know, selling that data to third parties that could use the information for all sorts of stuff, you know, advertising being the obvious one, but not necessarily the only one. Anyway, It'll be interesting to see if Google and Apple respond to this or how or if TikTok will now. Let's flip over to Instagram, where the app has quietly made changes to a feature that allows users to set a daily time limit for their use of Instagram. So previously you could go into your settings and set it your your daily limit to as low as ten minutes a day, and that would make it easier to be aware of how much time you were actually spending on the platform and avoid getting sucked into hours of just scrolling. This is an opt in feature, so it's not like it's on by default, but it was there. But now that ten minute and fifteen minute time limit limit options, those are both gone. The minimum time limit that you can set now is thirty minutes. Now, I am not shocked to hear this. After all, Meta Again, Instagram's parent company had that earnings call that revealed some pretty rough news to investors. Besides that ten billion dollars in lost revenue or estimated lost revenue, it's really hard to, you know, guarantee revenue that you lost because you didn't make it. But anyway, the former iron grip that Facebook and Instagram had on the average person's online time is starting to slip. So perhaps one way the company is trying to address this is to loosen the restrictions a little bit for that daily time limit option, saying, hey, you know, thirty minutes isn't all that bad. That should probably be your upper limit um and have that set as the lowest option. Now, some folks who who have used the feature, we'll find that they will be spending more time on the platform before they bump up against their daily limit. Now, to be totally fair, this could just as easily be an example, but where Meta just saw that very few people were opting in for ten or fifteen minute time limits, because that is a very short amount of time. So it's possible that the company just said, nobody's using these settings like that, it's such a tiny thing, it doesn't make sense to support it, and they just dropped those options. Uh so you might as well, you know, ask those especially if you feel like you can't afford to discourage people from being on your platform anyway. I suspect this is just one of a billion different things that the company plans to do to try and reverse some concerning trends, namely that some platforms like Facebook have seen a decline in users or an engagement or both, and that the company has had a little bit of trouble attracting younger users to its platforms, which means that you know, the user base will shrink over time as it ages out. Pro Publica and The New York Times investigated hundreds of accounts on Twitter that appeared to be part of a Chinese propaganda campaign during the Olympics, which prompted Twitter to ban three thousand accounts, and the campaign was doing pretty much what you'd expect when you hear the word propaganda. It was trying to present an overly positive portrayal of China and the Olympic Games, while simultaneously ignoring or discounting stories related to human rights abuses in China, of which there are many. Twitter reps said that the platform banned those accounts because they were violating the company's policy against platform manipulation. So essentially the issue here was that these accounts were all trying to feed into massive conversations about the Olympics and China and to steer those conversations in a specific positive way. And you might be familiar with the term sock puppet account so way back in the early days of the Internet, I would spot these on occasion, either in chat rooms or on forums. But this is where a user creates a separate account, like they have an account with whatever it is, but they create a separate account in order to achieve some sort of goal. It's possible that they make the sock puppet, which is it's called that because it is under the control of another user who's also in the same space. Uh, the sock puppet might act like a hype man for the primary user like oh yeah, this guy is so great yea, Or sometimes the stock puppet stood in as an easily defeatable opponent, right, because if you're controlling both sides the argument, you can easily make the other side lose. So would be a straw man for the primary user to to tear down and look like a hero. The Twitter situation is similar, except instead of one fake account used to push a narrative, we're talking about thousands. They were all pushing to to shape this conversation online in a specific way, and Twitter said, yeah, you can't do that. That's manipulating the platform for your own purposes. That's against the rules, And so got to banning a remarkable with three thousand accounts there, I wonder how many more are out there. Over in the EU, a consumer advocacy group called the b e u C has called for the Digital Markets Act or d m A, which is slowly taking shape in the EU. It's set to become you know, law before too long. They wanted to include the ability for individual users to sue big tech companies for violations, so right now, as it is currently formed, the d m A would only allow business users to sue companies that violate the rules under d m A, but the b e u C once that extended to all EU citizens, whether collectively in class action suits or individually. Now, the d m A sets out the major rules that big tech companies have to follow within the EU, and specifically, it's aiming at gate keepers, and the legislation defines gatekeepers as large online platforms that quote have a strong economic position, significant impact on the internal market, and are active in multiple EU countries. They have a strong intermediation position meaning that they link a large user base to a large number of businesses, and have an entrenched and durable position in the market, meaning that it is stable over time end quote. So companies like Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft would qualify. The regulations guarantee certain rights to third parties such as, uh, you know, if you are running your business on top of another company's platform, the other company whose platform it is, they can't uh promote their own products over yours. So the easiest example to point out is Amazon, right, because Amazon has its own brands and its own partners, and the company has stood accused many times of promoting its own products over those of competing vendors who are using the Amazon marketplace as a place to sell their stuff. And Amazon's landed in hot water all over the world for this about promoting its own products over those of the customers that are using the platform for their own online marketplace. And so the d m A and the EU would make this illegal, and it would mean that an individual would be able to sue, say Amazon, if they violated or they believed that Amazon violated the d m A. Anyway, there's no guarantee yet that we're going to see the d m A expand to allow individuals to pursue claims against big tech the way that businesses could if it's you know, when it's finally finalized. So we'll have to keep an eye out see what happens. All right, We've got some more stories to go into, but before we do that, let's take a quick break. You know, not too long ago, I did an update about the hyper loop, which was originally started off at least in the public consciousness, started off as a proposal that Elon Musk made two revolutionize short range travel, like travel that send the hundreds of miles but not the thousands of miles distances using enclosed trains typically the enclosed system would have a lot of the air pumped out to cut down an air resistance. You're usually talking about some sort of mag lev or other levitation style train. Uh Musk's version used air bearings. And I talked about how various companies had come up trying to make this a reality, including one that became known as First hyper Loop Technologies, than hyper Loop one, then Virgin hyper Loop one, and now just Virgin hyper Loop, and that the story was that recently Virgin hyper Loop had made the decision to pivot away from designing passenger style systems and focus more on cargo. And to that end, there's more news that now the company has laid off more than one hundred employees as part of this, that they are refocusing on cargo versus passengers, which is you know, particularly sad because it wasn't that long ago. It was just last summer that the company was showing off its passenger capabilities. But no, looks like that's not going to be at least in the near future for Hyperloop. It maybe that they'll eventually get back into that, but for now it is off the table. So just a quick update that those hundred or so folks. I think it's a hundred and eleven actually who lost their jobs. Hope they all land on their feet. Uh, but yeah, pretty disappointing if you were hoping for a revolutionary change in transportation. Then again, there are other hyper loop companies out there, you know. And I also mentioned in a different episode about how the I r S and the United States recently reversed its decision to require people to use video selfies and a facial recognition system run by a third party i D company in order to access certain I r S features online. So if you are a US citizen and you want to create an ir S account, well you can still do that video selfie and facial recognition route if you like. You are not required to, but you can use that. If you don't want to use that, then what you have to do is sit for a live virtual interview to verify your identity. Now, that sounds to me like a pretty labor intensive solution. I don't know if the I r S will be providing these interviews themselves, or you know, if they'll be working with another company, but yeah, it sounds like it's still gonna be pretty intense to to get that. I r S account established last week, a cargo ship carrying hundreds of luxury cars caught fire as it was heading across the Atlantic from Europe to North America. The cargo included cars from Porsche more than a thousand of them and Bentley more than a d nine of those, I believe, and the cause of the fire has not yet been determined or at least not yet announced as I'm recording this, but it appears that batteries in some of the electric vehicles in the cargo played a part in making the fire more difficult to extinguish. So we don't know if the batteries actually caused the fire, like if there was a short circuit, if one of the batteries was you know, damaged in transportation or something and that led to it, or if they just exacerbated a fire that got caused by some other source. But they it definitely made the fire worse. Unfortunately, all twenty two crew members of the ship, called the Felicity Ace were rescued, so there were there were no losses aboard, which is the most important thing. You know, we can replace stuff, we can't replace people. But yeah, it's I'm sure for all the luxury car lovers out there. They're shedding a tear as they think of the various Porsche's and Bentley's and uch uh burning to a crisp very sad. The United States Copyright Office has answered a burning question in science fiction. Can a robot hold a copyright for a work that the robot produced? No, they can't. Actually, to be fair, that is too narrow a use case. Really, The Copyright Office has said, no artificial intelligence can secure a copyright for a work that the AI itself creates. So all those interesting projects and AI that revolve around computer systems or robots creating art cannot get a copyright for any art that they produce. This is still really too narrow a view because honestly, the Copyright Office essentially says for something to qualify for a copyright, it has to be the product of human authorship. So, in other words, if it ain't made by a human, it don't get no copyright. If you had an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters and one of them created the best novel ever written, that novel would be in the public domain because the monkey ain't no human. The same is true for AI, it sounds like, and that does make an interesting note. The U S Copyright Office is one of the few entities I know of that has already determined that artificial intelligence cannot be considered equivalent to human intelligence. Now I'm being a little flippant here because this doesn't mean one that we're always going to see the Copyright Office take this interpretation. That could change over time, especially as AI gets more you know, sophisticated, and to AI as it stands is incredible, but still very much different from and arguably inferior to human intelligence when we take intelligence as a whole, not just the ability to solve problems, but when you take things like creativity, innovation, out of the box thinking, associative thinking, all that kind of stuff, things that humans are very good at. Most machine systems are not very good at it. So in those respects you could argue machines are still way behind us. Anyway, if you make a computer program that composes music or poetry or whatever, just know that the program will not be able to secure a copyright on the work it generates. Though I guess you know, depending upon how you word it, you might be able to get a copyright for the program itself. So that's something right. And if your robot gets depressed that the U. S. Copyright Office refuses to acknowledge its art, well it can always go apply for a job at Whitecastle. Yes, the company has announced it will be installing a robot from miso or Robotics called the Flippy two in one white Castle locations. Now, if you're not familiar with White Castle, that's a fast food chain here in the United States. Harold and Kumar like to go there. In fact, they should do another Harold and Kumar movie and make the Flippy robots look like the Terminator. That would be awesome, a great stoner science fiction comedy movie. You're welcome, Hollywood. I'll take my check. But anyway, the Flippy robot mostly looks like a robotic arm mounted to a frame that can move between fry stations. It does not look like the Terminator. So it would take some you know, poetic license to make the movie that I just pitched. But this will allow Whitecastle to automate some of the kitchen work. It is not the only fast food company that has been you know, investing in AI and robotics in order to do this. Um, I think if it means that, if it means these companies are employing fewer humans, but that they're paying the humans that they do employ more of a living wage, I'm all for it, although I of course worry that it will just mean that they'll say, hey, look, we got to cut all those salaries out of all those uh those uh, those franchises, and now we get to keep more money for ourselves. I worry that that's how it's going to go, but you know, hasn't been written yet. Maybe maybe I should hold out. Hope. That's it for today's tech news. Please let me know if you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's a technology, a company, a trend in tech, anything like that. Reach out to me on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again releases y. Tech Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio. And how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for February twenty second, twenty twenty two, otherwise known as the date where you just start hitting the number two until it's March. Let's get to it. So, back during the Trump administration here in the United States, we saw the US government pressure the social network platform TikTok to sever ties with its Chinese parent company byte Dance, citing a concern that TikTok could be siphoning personal data from US citizens and sending that information back to China. Claimed that TikTok refuted at the time, and there were a lot of other issues that were tied up with this as well. It was just that it was this larger trade war between the US and China. But it turns out that a pair of studies kind of justifies those data concerns. A group of cybersecurity experts conducted studies that we're looking into TikTok's data collection practices and concluded that TikTok has been allowing byte Dance to have full access to user data on the platform. The security experts sent their findings to the news website The Rap and The Wrap then did a very responsible thing from journalism standpoint, They sought out other experts to independently confirm the findings, which they did. TikTok, as of this recording, has not yet responded to those reports. Further, the research suggests that TikTok engineers have found a way to sidestep code audits by both Google and Apple, which could also mean that TikTok could potentially change the code without folks really knowing about it, which brings up all sorts of issue is and it suggests that TikTok has found some loopholes that's exploiting while other platforms like say Facebook, continued to be buffeted by recent changes to IOSS privacy and data tracking settings. You might remember that was a big part of why Meta, the parent company to Facebook, had such a rough year last year. They lost out on an estimated ten billion dollars in revenue because Apple changed it's it's data tracking privacy settings. Now, according to those security experts, the TikTok application can even query things on whatever devices installed on so kind of similar to the data tracking issue, where it's not just tracking your activity within the the app itself, but other stuff you're doing on your down that same device. So essentially TikTok has been able to do what Facebook used to do but no longer can do, at least if you opt out. My guess is that China isn't so much spying on individual US citizens to build out you know, dossiers on everyone, but they're rather you know, selling that data to third parties that could use the information for all sorts of stuff, you know, advertising being the obvious one, but not necessarily the only one. Anyway, It'll be interesting to see if Google and Apple respond to this or how or if TikTok will now. Let's flip over to Instagram, where the app has quietly made changes to a feature that allows users to set a daily time limit for their use of Instagram. So previously you could go into your settings and set it your your daily limit to as low as ten minutes a day, and that would make it easier to be aware of how much time you were actually spending on the platform and avoid getting sucked into hours of just scrolling. This is an opt in feature, so it's not like it's on by default, but it was there. But now that ten minute and fifteen minute time limit limit options, those are both gone. The minimum time limit that you can set now is thirty minutes. Now, I am not shocked to hear this. After all, Meta Again, Instagram's parent company had that earnings call that revealed some pretty rough news to investors. Besides that ten billion dollars in lost revenue or estimated lost revenue, it's really hard to, you know, guarantee revenue that you lost because you didn't make it. But anyway, the former iron grip that Facebook and Instagram had on the average person's online time is starting to slip. So perhaps one way the company is trying to address this is to loosen the restrictions a little bit for that daily time limit option, saying, hey, you know, thirty minutes isn't all that bad. That should probably be your upper limit um and have that set as the lowest option. Now, some folks who who have used the feature, we'll find that they will be spending more time on the platform before they bump up against their daily limit. Now, to be totally fair, this could just as easily be an example, but where Meta just saw that very few people were opting in for ten or fifteen minute time limits, because that is a very short amount of time. So it's possible that the company just said, nobody's using these settings like that, it's such a tiny thing, it doesn't make sense to support it, and they just dropped those options. Uh so you might as well, you know, ask those especially if you feel like you can't afford to discourage people from being on your platform anyway. I suspect this is just one of a billion different things that the company plans to do to try and reverse some concerning trends, namely that some platforms like Facebook have seen a decline in users or an engagement or both, and that the company has had a little bit of trouble attracting younger users to its platforms, which means that you know, the user base will shrink over time as it ages out. Pro Publica and The New York Times investigated hundreds of accounts on Twitter that appeared to be part of a Chinese propaganda campaign during the Olympics, which prompted Twitter to ban three thousand accounts, and the campaign was doing pretty much what you'd expect when you hear the word propaganda. It was trying to present an overly positive portrayal of China and the Olympic Games, while simultaneously ignoring or discounting stories related to human rights abuses in China, of which there are many. Twitter reps said that the platform banned those accounts because they were violating the company's policy against platform manipulation. So essentially the issue here was that these accounts were all trying to feed into massive conversations about the Olympics and China and to steer those conversations in a specific positive way. And you might be familiar with the term sock puppet account so way back in the early days of the Internet, I would spot these on occasion, either in chat rooms or on forums. But this is where a user creates a separate account, like they have an account with whatever it is, but they create a separate account in order to achieve some sort of goal. It's possible that they make the sock puppet, which is it's called that because it is under the control of another user who's also in the same space. Uh, the sock puppet might act like a hype man for the primary user like oh yeah, this guy is so great yea, Or sometimes the stock puppet stood in as an easily defeatable opponent, right, because if you're controlling both sides the argument, you can easily make the other side lose. So would be a straw man for the primary user to to tear down and look like a hero. The Twitter situation is similar, except instead of one fake account used to push a narrative, we're talking about thousands. They were all pushing to to shape this conversation online in a specific way, and Twitter said, yeah, you can't do that. That's manipulating the platform for your own purposes. That's against the rules, And so got to banning a remarkable with three thousand accounts there, I wonder how many more are out there. Over in the EU, a consumer advocacy group called the b e u C has called for the Digital Markets Act or d m A, which is slowly taking shape in the EU. It's set to become you know, law before too long. They wanted to include the ability for individual users to sue big tech companies for violations, so right now, as it is currently formed, the d m A would only allow business users to sue companies that violate the rules under d m A, but the b e u C once that extended to all EU citizens, whether collectively in class action suits or individually. Now, the d m A sets out the major rules that big tech companies have to follow within the EU, and specifically, it's aiming at gate keepers, and the legislation defines gatekeepers as large online platforms that quote have a strong economic position, significant impact on the internal market, and are active in multiple EU countries. They have a strong intermediation position meaning that they link a large user base to a large number of businesses, and have an entrenched and durable position in the market, meaning that it is stable over time end quote. So companies like Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft would qualify. The regulations guarantee certain rights to third parties such as, uh, you know, if you are running your business on top of another company's platform, the other company whose platform it is, they can't uh promote their own products over yours. So the easiest example to point out is Amazon, right, because Amazon has its own brands and its own partners, and the company has stood accused many times of promoting its own products over those of competing vendors who are using the Amazon marketplace as a place to sell their stuff. And Amazon's landed in hot water all over the world for this about promoting its own products over those of the customers that are using the platform for their own online marketplace. And so the d m A and the EU would make this illegal, and it would mean that an individual would be able to sue, say Amazon, if they violated or they believed that Amazon violated the d m A. Anyway, there's no guarantee yet that we're going to see the d m A expand to allow individuals to pursue claims against big tech the way that businesses could if it's you know, when it's finally finalized. So we'll have to keep an eye out see what happens. All right, We've got some more stories to go into, but before we do that, let's take a quick break. You know, not too long ago, I did an update about the hyper loop, which was originally started off at least in the public consciousness, started off as a proposal that Elon Musk made two revolutionize short range travel, like travel that send the hundreds of miles but not the thousands of miles distances using enclosed trains typically the enclosed system would have a lot of the air pumped out to cut down an air resistance. You're usually talking about some sort of mag lev or other levitation style train. Uh Musk's version used air bearings. And I talked about how various companies had come up trying to make this a reality, including one that became known as First hyper Loop Technologies, than hyper Loop one, then Virgin hyper Loop one, and now just Virgin hyper Loop, and that the story was that recently Virgin hyper Loop had made the decision to pivot away from designing passenger style systems and focus more on cargo. And to that end, there's more news that now the company has laid off more than one hundred employees as part of this, that they are refocusing on cargo versus passengers, which is you know, particularly sad because it wasn't that long ago. It was just last summer that the company was showing off its passenger capabilities. But no, looks like that's not going to be at least in the near future for Hyperloop. It maybe that they'll eventually get back into that, but for now it is off the table. So just a quick update that those hundred or so folks. I think it's a hundred and eleven actually who lost their jobs. Hope they all land on their feet. Uh, but yeah, pretty disappointing if you were hoping for a revolutionary change in transportation. Then again, there are other hyper loop companies out there, you know. And I also mentioned in a different episode about how the I r S and the United States recently reversed its decision to require people to use video selfies and a facial recognition system run by a third party i D company in order to access certain I r S features online. So if you are a US citizen and you want to create an ir S account, well you can still do that video selfie and facial recognition route if you like. You are not required to, but you can use that. If you don't want to use that, then what you have to do is sit for a live virtual interview to verify your identity. Now, that sounds to me like a pretty labor intensive solution. I don't know if the I r S will be providing these interviews themselves, or you know, if they'll be working with another company, but yeah, it sounds like it's still gonna be pretty intense to to get that. I r S account established last week, a cargo ship carrying hundreds of luxury cars caught fire as it was heading across the Atlantic from Europe to North America. The cargo included cars from Porsche more than a thousand of them and Bentley more than a d nine of those, I believe, and the cause of the fire has not yet been determined or at least not yet announced as I'm recording this, but it appears that batteries in some of the electric vehicles in the cargo played a part in making the fire more difficult to extinguish. So we don't know if the batteries actually caused the fire, like if there was a short circuit, if one of the batteries was you know, damaged in transportation or something and that led to it, or if they just exacerbated a fire that got caused by some other source. But they it definitely made the fire worse. Unfortunately, all twenty two crew members of the ship, called the Felicity Ace were rescued, so there were there were no losses aboard, which is the most important thing. You know, we can replace stuff, we can't replace people. But yeah, it's I'm sure for all the luxury car lovers out there. They're shedding a tear as they think of the various Porsche's and Bentley's and uch uh burning to a crisp very sad. The United States Copyright Office has answered a burning question in science fiction. Can a robot hold a copyright for a work that the robot produced? No, they can't. Actually, to be fair, that is too narrow a use case. Really, The Copyright Office has said, no artificial intelligence can secure a copyright for a work that the AI itself creates. So all those interesting projects and AI that revolve around computer systems or robots creating art cannot get a copyright for any art that they produce. This is still really too narrow a view because honestly, the Copyright Office essentially says for something to qualify for a copyright, it has to be the product of human authorship. So, in other words, if it ain't made by a human, it don't get no copyright. If you had an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters and one of them created the best novel ever written, that novel would be in the public domain because the monkey ain't no human. The same is true for AI, it sounds like, and that does make an interesting note. The U S Copyright Office is one of the few entities I know of that has already determined that artificial intelligence cannot be considered equivalent to human intelligence. Now I'm being a little flippant here because this doesn't mean one that we're always going to see the Copyright Office take this interpretation. That could change over time, especially as AI gets more you know, sophisticated, and to AI as it stands is incredible, but still very much different from and arguably inferior to human intelligence when we take intelligence as a whole, not just the ability to solve problems, but when you take things like creativity, innovation, out of the box thinking, associative thinking, all that kind of stuff, things that humans are very good at. Most machine systems are not very good at it. So in those respects you could argue machines are still way behind us. Anyway, if you make a computer program that composes music or poetry or whatever, just know that the program will not be able to secure a copyright on the work it generates. Though I guess you know, depending upon how you word it, you might be able to get a copyright for the program itself. So that's something right. And if your robot gets depressed that the U. S. Copyright Office refuses to acknowledge its art, well it can always go apply for a job at Whitecastle. Yes, the company has announced it will be installing a robot from miso or Robotics called the Flippy two in one white Castle locations. Now, if you're not familiar with White Castle, that's a fast food chain here in the United States. Harold and Kumar like to go there. In fact, they should do another Harold and Kumar movie and make the Flippy robots look like the Terminator. That would be awesome, a great stoner science fiction comedy movie. You're welcome, Hollywood. I'll take my check. But anyway, the Flippy robot mostly looks like a robotic arm mounted to a frame that can move between fry stations. It does not look like the Terminator. So it would take some you know, poetic license to make the movie that I just pitched. But this will allow Whitecastle to automate some of the kitchen work. It is not the only fast food company that has been you know, investing in AI and robotics in order to do this. Um, I think if it means that, if it means these companies are employing fewer humans, but that they're paying the humans that they do employ more of a living wage, I'm all for it, although I of course worry that it will just mean that they'll say, hey, look, we got to cut all those salaries out of all those uh those uh, those franchises, and now we get to keep more money for ourselves. I worry that that's how it's going to go, but you know, hasn't been written yet. Maybe maybe I should hold out. Hope. That's it for today's tech news. Please let me know if you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's a technology, a company, a trend in tech, anything like that. Reach out to me on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again releases y. Tech Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.