Even as Twitter headcount dwindles, Elon Musk announces an ambitious vision for the service's future. Alphabet is gearing up for layoffs. Tax prep services have been sending Americans' financial info to Meta. And more!
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 is time for the Tech News for November twenty second, two thousand twenty two, the Tuesday before American Thanksgiving. So the rest of this week is going to be reruns and then we'll be back next week with all new episodes. But let's get to the news today, and you know the drill. We need to get the Twitter stuff out of the way first, because obviously a ton has happened since our last news episode on Thursday of last week. So last Thursday, Elon Musk's ultimatum hit. Employees had to sign a form indicating whether they would stick it out and work longer, harder hours to build what Musk calls Twitter two point oh, which we'll talk about the it in a second, or if they would take a severance package and just walk. And reportedly a lot of folks, maybe as many as a thousand, took that package. It's hard to get a real number because I feel some of the reporting has been fueled by schadenfreude and also Twitter no longer has a public relations office Elon must got rid of that early on in the layoffs, so there's no one to ask to get official feedback on this stuff. There were stories about entire departments within Twitter essentially being emptied, including departments like payroll, which obviously would create a real hassle at the company. One story that proved to at least have some substance was that the folks in charge of monitoring badge access to Twitter h q had left, and since Musk had directed Twitter HQ two essentially go on lockdown for this week, the idea being they want to keep the area safe from disgruntled former employees while things settle down. Uh. It also meant that no one, not even Musk, could regain access to the building because all the people who maintain that had left, So Musk actually had to call up a now former employee to come in and open the building up again, which is pretty wild anyway. Tons of people popped on Twitter throughout the weekend, waiting to see if it might crash and not come back up, you know, kind of like I was there when Twitter went away, but for now the site is still active. I imagine the people left at Twitter are really working super hard to make sure that stays the case. Meanwhile, Musk has also sent a memo in Twitter indicating that many employee perks are now gonzo, as in they are no more at least for the time being. And that includes stuff like company allowances for home internet, employee wellness programs, training and development programs, daycare, and quarterly team activities, among other things. So for the folks who are left behind, there are fewer and fewer benefits that they can take advantage of while they work longer and longer hours. Of course, for some employees, working for Twitter is absolutely critical. Some are here in the US on work visas and if their employment ends, they have to leave the country. Some are dependent upon healthcare for ongoing treatments. So even if you never use Twitter, or you've never liked Twitter, or maybe you hate Twitter now, whatever it might be, please send out good vibes for the people who are in tough situations that are just continuing to get tougher. I mean, for all the people who resigned, who are laid off, and for the people who are still at Twitter. It is a tough time to be in that situation, especially right as the holidays are picking up. But wait, there's more. After all that drama late last week, this week opened with even more drama. Musk announced that he was holding even more layoffs, this time specifically targeting twitters sales teams. Last week, the company saw the head of ads Ales and the VP of Partnerships both get their walking papers. Reportedly, these leaders were fired because they refused directives to lay off more of their employees. They were trying to protect the people who are working in their departments, and they've been canned as a result. So must decide that if these folks are not going to follow his orders, they gots to go. And then the head of US Content Partnerships left the company. From what I can tell, she made that choice on her own. So it's possible that she saw what was going on in other departments and said I can't be a part of this, or maybe she had other reasons. I don't know, but she left the company as well. So the senior leadership at Twitter continues to dwindle. When Musk assumed control of Twitter, the company had seventy five hundred employees seven thousand, five hundred people. Now, The Verge reports that the head count is down to around two thousand, seven hundred, and Business Insider is even more pessimistic. They say it's actually two thousand, three hundred employees. Yesterday, after the sales team layoffs, must held in all hands meeting where he announced that he'd be hiring again, specifically that he was looking to hire people in engineering, and hang on a second, says here sales, you know the department where he had just laid people off. Well, details are somewhat scarce because you know, again no public relations department within the company, so you can't really reach out to get comment. But outlets are saying that Musk himself was fairly vague about what these people would be doing. So, yeah, he needs engineers and he needs needs salespeople, but he didn't specify what roles he was looking to fill. Um And at least as of yesterday, there were no job openings listed on Twitter's corporate site, but Musk said, quote, in terms of critical hires, I would say people who are great at writing software are the highest priority end quote. And one recent higher well and in turn is George hots H o t Z. If you're not familiar with Hotts's name, he's a hacker, and he made his name doing things like jail breaking iOS devices. Uh. He figured out how the PlayStation three works, he reverse engineered it. Uh. Infamously, he had a real kind of tiff with Elon Musk. Musk apparently wanted Hots to come over and work for Tesla because Hatts was looking to replicate Tesla's auto pilot system, but make it like a kit that you could just get and install into other machines, like other cars, and so Musk reportedly wanted to offer Hots a job, but Hots says that while they were sitting down to work out terms, they couldn't come to an agreement, and eventually Hots split and he got irritated at Musk. But now Hots has agreed to spend twelve weeks working at Twitter, and he says it's his main focus is to work on search functions for Twitter itself. So what do you do after you lay off half of your company, your newly purchased company. You then convince another one thousand or so folks to resign. You require engineers to come in on a weekend to cram on code and keep things afloat, and then you call in all hands, meaning to talk about hiring again, well, you also unveil your plan for the next incarnation of your company. Musk's Twitter two point oh is going to have voice calls and video chat and encryption for direct messages, according to Elon himself, and it's sounding like Musk is merging his vision of Twitter with his desire to build and everything app that he had previously referred to as X. You may not know this, but when Musk was first founding UH, I believe it was PayPal co founding PayPal, he wanted to call it X and ended up not calling it that because they thought that probably wouldn't be a viable business name. But now he wants to make an everything app called X that would be similar to China's we Chat app, and we Chat incorporates tons of off like communications, social networking, commerce features, all these sort of things. Elon Musk kind of wants to make a similar app to that, but for markets outside of China. Obviously, whether he can do that with a team that has been so heavily affected by layoffs and resignations remains to be seen. Reportedly, a lot of the folks who have left Twitter were ones who are senior members of their respective teams, which could represent a huge loss of knowledge like that alone is going to set people back when you've got people who were sort of the the depositories of knowledge within the company and they leave. I mean, if the documentation is there, then you can you can muscle your way through it, but it takes time. But the documentation isn't there, then it gets increasingly difficult. Elon Musk himself has said that several of Twitter's departments are going to need to be rebuilt from scratch, which seems to me to be a monumental undertaking of itself that where people are going to be around to actually tackle. So it definitely sounds like it's gonna be a tough time ahead. Um and in the meantime, we don't know if any of this is realistic, even from inside Twitter, because again there's no PR department there. Well, that's it for the Twitter dues. Will move on to some other things after we come back from this quick break. Okay, we're back. So last spring, the National Labor Relations Board, or in l RB here in the United States brought a lawsuit against Amazon, saying that the company had engaged in retaliatory actions against employees who are workplace activists, namely that Amazon fired former employee Gerald Bryson after Bryson worked to organize employees at a warehouse on Staten Island that went on to actually vote to unionize. Now, a judge has partly ruled in favor of the n l RBS argument. They have said that Amazon did engage in such behaviors and that Amazon needs to knock that crap off in the future. However, the judge did not go so far as to agree with the n l r B the Amazon's actions impacted employees efforts to unionize and that the company should reinstate Bryson. So, the n l RB said Bryson's firing was intended to scare other employees away from organizing, because firing Bryson showed that other employees would receive no protection during the actual organization process. That yes, once you are unionized, you have an organization that can protect you from the company, but until that happens, you are incredibly vulnerable. But the judge determined that employees continue to organize even in the wake of Bryson's firing, and so did not agree to the request to have Bryson reinstated as an Ama on employee. So Amazon does have a cease and desist order against it regarding interfering and employee organization efforts, but the company will not have to hire Bryson back on the team. As I mentioned last week, Amazon is holding layoffs that are expected to hit around ten thousand employees before they're all done, and the hardware divisions have been affected a lot by this, and Business Insider reports that the Amazon Alexa division is in real jeopardy right now. My apologies for any of you who have Amazon devices in ear shot, but we are going to have to say that name a couple of times. The project began as a Jeff Bezos backed idea. That is, Alexa was like Jeff Bezos's baby for a little while, but after a few years of failing to find any way to drive revenue via Alexa, the shine on the product has really worn off for the company. Of course, Bezos has no longer had Hancho at Amazon. You've got Andy Jase there as CEO now, and he tends to take a more pragmatic view of the business. And according to various reports, a big part of the problem is that while Amazon's Echo devices are really popular, they sell really well. The company is selling them at cost with the goal of making money off of the use of the devices, rather than through the sale of devices themselves. So this is similar to how companies that make game consoles will sell those consoles close to the cost of production. So while a game console might be hundreds of dollars, that typically isn't making the company a lot of profit or any profit with each sale. Sometimes companies even take a loss on it because their ideas that they'll make their money by selling you games and services that leverage the console, the consoles the entry point to making revenue. Well, that's how Amazon was looking at the Echo line of products. But the problem is the team never quite figured out a way to monetize Alexa's use, and so the division and accrued more and more financial losses over time, and according to Ours Technica, that division is headed toward a ten billion dollar loss this year billion with a B Holy cow. Just to be clear, this problem is not unique to Amazon. Apple and Google each have found it difficult to monetize their digital voice assistant products. People have been using them, but there hasn't really been a way to tap into that use and generate revenue. And that could mean that the days of us talking to our electronics like we're aboard the starship Enterprise and we're chatting with the ship's computer could be living on borrowed time across the pond. In the United Kingdom, regulators are taking a closer look at the mobile operating system landscape. So the concern is that Google's Android and Apple's iOS represent a duopoli, you know, two companies that control pretty much the entire mobile operating system landscape. And I don't think you can really argue that. I think that's pretty much effectively the case. I mean, there's not really that many operating systems in the laptop desktop universe either. You've got a few, but the two dominant ones, really the dominant one is Windows and then you've got mac os. There are others as well, their Linux systems, their unique systems, but those represent such a a small percentage of at least a particular slice of computer. Like if we're talking about web servers is a totally different thing. But anyway, this do woppoli may have a negative impact on app developers. Specifically, the Competition and Markets Authority in the UK or the c m A is looking into issues that impact mobile gaming. So one thing they're looking at is cloud gaming, which is where you have servers that run an instance of a game and then stream that instance too and in device like a smartphone. Another is that developers claim Apple and Google have failed to address deficiencies in their respective browsers, which in turn forces developers to create workarounds to try and deal with these shortfalls. So the CMA is going to investigate these developer concerns. They're gonna look into this and then if they decide that the concerns are merited and changes are warranted, they will issue a kind of patch response. Now, there is an entire department within the UK that is intended to deal with just this kind of thing, and it's called the Digital Markets Unit. But the problem is this particular agency lacks any regulatory authority, Like they have no way of creating any implements of change because they don't have any authority yet. So that's that's an agency that's still kind of forming and until it gets some bite to it, it really it really can't do much. So the dirty work is following falling to other departments for the time being. Alphabet Google's parent company appears to be bending to pressure brought against it by Sir Christopher Hone, whom you might remember owns some six billion dollars worth of steak in the company, and Hone had argued that Google was overstaffed and that employees there are overpaid, which, again I want to say, is really saying something when you're a freaking billionaire. Okay, when you're a billionaire and you're saying other people are overpaid, maybe rethink your statements a bit, But enough commentary. The crux of this story is that Alphabet has directed Google managers to identify the low performers in their departments, and the bottom six percent or so, which would be around ten thousand employees, will presumably be shown the door. And it's a really tough time to be working for tech companies right now. Amazon, Meta, Twitter, infamously, Alphabet and many others have been laying off thousands of people right at the start of the holiday season. So if you're listening to the show and you've been affected directly or indirectly by these layoffs, I just want to say I wish you the absolute best. I hope things turn around quickly. And as for the argument that companies like Alphabet and particularly Google have too many employees. Part of that can actually be a strategy to scoop up talent so that this talent doesn't end up working for a competitor because it is a cut road business out in Silicon Valley, y'all. Just in case my fellow Americans weren't worried enough that Meta slash Facebook is gathering all of their data, let's talk about taxes, shall we. So The Markup has published a piece that says tax services like tax Slayer, tax Act, and H and R Block have been transmitting financial information from web clients that are coming to do their taxes online to Facebook. And that information being sent to Facebook includes some pretty you know, standard stuff like like person names and their email addresses and user names, that kind of stuff. But in some cases at least, it also includes more privileged information like income filing status, refund amounts, the actual amount of income a person makes, that kind of thing. And you might be saying to yourself, Huh, does matter really know how much I make? Do they need to know that how much I pay in taxes or whether or not I qualify for a refund? Do I want Meta to use that kind of information as a way to sell more targeted ads to me. I mean, you can easily see why Meta would like that information in the first place, because advertisers would love to be able to more accurately target their customers. At the heart of this is the pixel. This is a product that Facebook offers up for free for companies to use, and installing pixel into a web page allows several things, Like on the web page side, it allows for a lot of customization of an experience, but the Facebook side, it means that users who visit these pages that have the pixel on it are sending data to Facebook. Facebook gets more information about user behaviors, like what websites are they visiting, how long are they spending time there, what are they doing in some cases, So in these cases the activities appear, at least in some instances to include sensitive financial data. Now, not all tax preparation services have the pixel installed on sensitive pages, even if they have used the pixel so into its Turbo Tax, which has its own history of issues, does use pixel, but it only has it at the log in page, which means that the pixel on that page sends information like user names and how frequently a specific device has logged into the service, but it doesn't include any financial information or anything like that, and the pixel is not included on any pages beyond the log in page. So Facebook isn't getting any more information about turbo taxes clients in that case. But for other tax preparation preparation services that's not necessarily the case. And if you don't live in the US, and you're wondering why I'm even talking about all this, because most places outside of the US, the government handles all this stuff, and really it just comes down to the individual citizen to sign off on what the government has found or to you know, take issue with it and explain, hey, you you missed this thing that should change the amount of taxes i owe. US does not do that. The tax preparation sequences is highly privatized here in the United States. Taxes are incredibly complex. If you do have a good grounding in how taxes are prepared, you can do it yourself, nothing stopping you. But a lot of people find them intimidating because the language used, the forms used, they're not they're not user friendly. So frequently people turn to professional services or web services that that automate A lot of the stuff. So that's why this is a huge issue here in the United States. And there's a lot more to this story, but I actually recommend heading over to the Verge and reading their article. It's titled tax filing. Websites have been sending users financial information to Facebook. Go check out that article. It's very well done. It's exhaustive, it's a very long article and incredibly informative. So check that out. Okay, we've got a few more news items to cover before we conclude, but first let's take one more break. We're back. Researchers at MISK, that's m Y s k are saying that Apple talks the talk, but does not necessarily walk the walk when it comes to user activity and privacy on iOS devices. So Apple famously handed over more control to iOS users when it comes to how their data and behavior can be tracked by third party apps. This was a huge blow to companies like Meta, for example, because users could choose to not share their behaviors and other private data with Meta, which meant that Meta could no longer use that data to sell targeted ads and have them target you, the user more effectively. But MISK says that Apple's first party apps don't have the same sort of restrictions, which may mean Apple is preventing other companies from being able to do what it itself can continue to do. On iOS. Miss said that some first party apps use what is called a Directory Services Identify R or D s I D, and that this identifier, in turn is linked to a user's unique I cloud data and Apple I D. So while Apple might say our apps are not depending on data that can personally identify you, it sounds like it's at best one degree of separation away from doing just that. Moreover, Miss researchers are arguing that other details can converge to create a kind of digital fingerprint for a user, so that while you might be able to say that no single point of data points to a specific person, if you collectively take all the different points of data, you can start making very educated guesses as to who that user is. We've seen this in the past. It really takes just a few points of data to kind of narrow down a person's identity, and you don't need anything specific to to really, you know, figure that out. You just need a few different general points and that's enough for you to make a really good guess. Now, this does not necessarily mean that Apple is doing anything with that data, right, We don't know that. We don't know if Apple is actually taking advantage of this data collection and analyzing it in any meaningful way. Uh. The problem is Apple's really quiet when it comes to its data acquisition and analytics, and that means that we do have these unanswered questions. We don't know if Apple is actually doing anything with data. It just seems like Apple could do something that Apple has that capability because of these little points of connection. And the problem is we don't know enough, so that breeds suspicion. But um, yeah, this is what happens when you have a lack of transparency. The Global Games Market report from New Zoo has good news and it has some bad news for the gaming industry. Now, the good news is that there are four point six percent more gamers there today than there were this time last year. Places like Africa in the Middle East saw the largest gains in people becoming gamers. North America grew the least. But even in North America, we saw two point six percent more gamers this year compared to last year. Uh. That's impressive because you gotta remember that there was a big, big boost in gaming during the pandemic, as people were, you know, in lockdown and they couldn't leave their their homes. There was a big surge towards gaming in various ways. Uh. So to see growth continue even as the world has largely emerged from lockdown is impressive. Now, the bad news is that even though there are more gamers, they generated less revenue this year compared to last year. Uh this is where we're reminded that gaming is a multibillion dollar industry, because even the revenue dropped by four point three percent globally, still amounted to a hundred eighty four billion dollars. Now, about half of that came just from mobile games. And that's a spassive meatball. I know, like quote unquote real gamers can often dismiss mobile games, but y'all, that makes up like half of all the revenue generated by gaming. If you look at consoles, that's like a little more than a quarter, and then PC is a little less than that, and then it's everything else. Right, So mobile gaming is by far the dominant form of gaming if you're looking at it from a global perspective. Uh. The decline in revenue was the first time the gaming industry saw a decline in fifteen years. But as tech spot points out, that's still not terrible considering how other industries have fared in the current era of economic uncertainty. I still wonder if in the future we will name this period as the Great Economic Uncertainty, sort of akin to the Great Depression. Speaking of games, about four years ago, it would be Soft made the decision to lean on the Epic Game Store when it came to digital distribution of its titles and its spurned valves competing Steam Store. These are online stores where you can purchase games and then download them directly to your machine. Now now Ubisoft is actually bringing some titles back to Steam. On December six, gamers will be able to purchase titles like Assassin's Creed, Valhalla, or a No. Eight hundred through Steam. So why did it be Soft ditch Steam in the first place. Well, it's very similar to how app developers are frustrated with Google and Apple because Steam takes a thirty cut off sales that are made through its store, so the game company only gets each sale it makes. Ubisoft didn't really care for that, and so it made the move to pull out of Steam. But Steam also has an incredible reach, is really popular with gamers. So while you will keep more of each individual sale, if you can get gamers to come to whichever digital storefront you use, there are potentially millions of gamers that you will never reach because they are more sticking to the Steam environment. So you could say like, well, yeah, on an individual level, we're making more per sale, but look at all these millions of sales were not making because we aren't where the people are, So it would be soft appears they have decided to go where the people are. Maybe we soft wants to see wants to see them dancing, walking around on those what do you call them. Finally, in a general trend of inclusivity, Axios reports that more big title games are untethering character creation tools from gendered terms. Players will have access to more options to create characters they feel they want to play. That can include players feeling that they are a closer match to the characters that they've created, which is nice. To be able to see representation of yourself in a game is incredible. So we're seeing a trend for games to allow players to mix and match features that often would have been divided into a gendered approach in the past, and now players are more frequently discovering they are not being forced down binary pathways where choosing one gender will limit you to a subset of features and options and remove others. So one example of a game that's doing this is World of Warcraft, which is preparing to release an expansion called Dragonflight. Wow has ditched the terms male and female in character creation instead opted for body type one and body type two. Other games like The Sims have done this, and surprisingly, so has Hogwarts Legacy. I say surprisingly for Hogwarts Legacy because Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling has made some infamous statements, mostly on Twitter, that are critical of the transgender community, but Hogwarts Legacies character creation system appears to allow trans characters. Personally, I think increased inclusivity is great. It is a huge benefit to people who otherwise would never see represent tation within a game, and on the flip side, it doesn't have negative impacts on anyone else who already had representation in games, so I see it as a net win. I like how games can bring people together, though obviously games have also served as incubators for hateful behavior, as well, it's complicated. Oh feet, that's what you call them. That's the stuff that people are dancing on. I'm glad we got that sorted out alright. That wraps up this episode of tech Stuff News. Hope you are all well. Hope you fellow Americans out there are getting ready for a joyful Thanksgiving. I hope you have lots to be thankful for. And if you have any suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff. There are a couple of ways to get in touch. One is to download the I Heart radio app. It's free to download, free to use. You can navigate over to tech Stuff. Just put tech Stuff in the little search bar that will bring you over to the tech Stuff podcast page. You'll see there a little microphone icon. If you click on that, you can leave a voice message up to thirty seconds in length if you like. You can even indicate if I can use that voice message in a future episode of tech Stuff. I will not do it unless you tell me it's okay, or if you prefer. You can reach out on Twitter, assuming that it's up and the handle there is tech stuff hs W. I did create an account on Mastodon. I will share that in the future when probably do a full episode about Mastodon, so people who are on Mastodon can find me there. And I'm looking at a couple of other possibilities. The problem is, of course, that one a lot of people are gonna stick with Twitter until it just isn't a thing anymore if that, in fact happens, and too if they choose something else. There are like a dozen other options, and I can't maintain a presence at all of them because I'll always forget one and I'll never be like, checking like fourteen different accounts for messages is a huge time sink. So we'll figure it out. We'll keep on going. Maybe I'll reach out yet again to get an email address for this show. Uh, I know that Ben Bowland keeps sending people to my personal email address to issue complaints from ridiculous history and stuff they don't want you to know because that's fun. But anyway, I hope you're all well and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.