Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. He there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio. And how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for a Thursday, December one, two thousand twenty two. Where did the year go? Yet again? I at the end of a year. I feel like the previous year both lasted an eternity and was over in the blink of an eye. I don't know how that is possible. I guess it's cause Einstein found out time is relative. Man, that guy was the worst. Okay, let's get to it. I am I'm kidding about Einstein. Let's get to the tech news so far this week, and um, it's getting little quiet, which is fine. Usually we do see tech news quiet down towards the end of the year, gearing up to c e s and then things get back into crazy town. So, first up, we have a scary situation here in the United States. I think it's pretty well understood by just about everybody that cyber attacks and cyber warfare are a constant threat. Really, they're constantly happening, whether it's from state sponsored hacking groups that are working on behalf of a government, or quote unquote independent groups that claim to merely be aligned with some nations goals but not actually you know, sponsored by that nation, or maybe it's a cyber criminal organization. But we've seen tons of attacks on various high profile targets all around the world. Well, the scary thing I read is that, according to cybersecurity researchers, eighty seven per cent of US defense contractors failed to meet basic cybersecurity regulations. Eighty seven per cent failed. That is a sobering thought. Infosecurity Magazines James Coker explains that to get a passing grade, they must achieve a score of seventy on the Supplier Risk Performance System as designed by the Pentagon. Only of defense contractors managed to do that. By the way, to be considered fully compliant, you would have to achieve a score of one ten. So yeah, this is a little like flunking your big math test, except in this case, your math test describes how prepared you are for cyber attacks and security intrusions. And considering we're talking about key contractors in the supply chain for the U. S Department of Defense, and that We've had so much conversation of the last two years about importance and delicacy of supply chains. This is a huge problem now, y'all. I have complained in the past about how the average person it's pretty bad at practicing basic infosecurity measures, but this is unfathomable to me. You would think that these companies, given the business that they are in, would be particularly careful, as they would clearly be high profile targets for hackers. But it appears the opposite is true now. In James Coker's article, which is called majority of US defense contractors not meeting basic cybersecurity requirements, well, he explains part of the problem is that traditionally the US government hasn't been super good at cracking down on these requirements. And you know, you just have to look at kids to know if a rule is not being enforced, well, you might just feel like there's no need to observe the rule in the first place, Like it's almost the same as no rule being there at all. Coker also points out that some of these contractors are, you know, smaller companies, They're not like huge defense contractors, and not all of them have the assets or experience or knowledge base that you find in some of the larger organizations, and that the learning curve to adopting proper security measures is a pretty steep one. It can be tough to do, and that may well be the case, but I maintain that when you consider the potential consequences of a security intrusion into the supply chain of national defense, having to buckle down in order to meet regulations is a tiny price to pay. While we're on the subject of infosecurity, I have in the past recommended that people adopt password vault systems so that they can create and store strong passwords for all the online services they use, and I still think that's a really good idea. I use one myself. You know you don't want to reu is the same password at all? You don't. I mean, you might want to for the sake of convenience, but you don't for the sake of security. You also want each of your passwords to be difficult to guess, and that means making each password really hard to remember. Because by difficult to guess, we're not just talking about for humans. We're talking about for computers too. Now you can do something really clever like you can pick say, three unrelated words for each service, and you string these three words together and that makes your password. This is actually a really good way to make a strong password. But even then, as you add more passwords, like as you have more and more services that you're doing this for, it can get a little tricky to remember which string of words you used for which service. So password vaults help out in this case, right, Typically you use one master password in order to access the vault, and then everything else is stored in the vault so you don't have to remember it well. One such password vault is last Pass, and unfortunately, hackers were able to access a cloud storage service used by last pass, and they were able to access quote unquote certain elements of last pass users information. Now, there hasn't really been any clarification on what that means exactly, like what information was accessed, and very little on if anything was even you know, taken. But presumably any passwords accessed are heavily encrypted, which at the very least makes it unlikely that the hackers are able to do anything with the information they stole, at least not right away. Further, last Pass says it does not store master passwords at all. That instead, when you put in your master password, it goes through what's called a one way salted hash. So this is an encryption process that is not reversible, and it generates this jumble of characters that can then be used as a key. Anyway, if you use last Pass, you might want to look in to see just you know what, if anything the service is recommending you do. It might be to change your master password, which you know you should be doing on the rag anyway, and I still think password vaults are a critical security tool for the average person. By the way, I actually use one myself. I used to use last Pass, but now I use a different one, So I mean I didn't have any issues with last Pass, I just kind of switched to a different service. But yeah, I still think that they're all, you know, important elements to personal data security. A few weeks back, the Washington Post published an article linking a software company to a US military contractor that raised a lot of eyebrows. So this software company is called trust Core Systems. That's a t R U S t c O R Systems, and it's in the business of issuing digital certificates, which is an important part of making sure that the sites you visit are in fact legitimate. So certificates are what tell browsers that a site is trustworthy, that there's been this designated authority or hundreds of them actually that ends up generating this certificate that says, yes, you can trust this website. So there are hundreds of these companies that you know, issue these kinds of certificates, and trust Core is one of them. But according to the Washington Post, trust Core has the same slate of officers, agents and partners as a company that's been known to make spywear and is in turn connected to a defense company called Packet Forensics. Now, when you hear the name packet Forensics, that suggests a company that's in the business of analyzing data transmissions, possibly to intercept communications and pass intelligence along to US government agencies. So this starts to paint a pretty ugly picture. You've got a company it's in charge of certifying trustworthiness that's tied to a company that is effectively spying on digital transmissions. The association has been enough for both Microsoft and Mozilla to stop trusting certificates from trust Core, which kind of seems to have an ironic name now doesn't it, and other browsers are likely to follow a suit anyway. Everybody's a spy, kind of like how in the john Wick movies everybody is an assassin. I mean, seriously, the entire economy in the john Wick universe must be assassin based. I guess that's a discussion for a different podcast. Across the pond, in the UK, more than one hundred thousand small businesses have joined in a class action lawsuit against Google, and they are seeking more than thirteen point five billion British pounds and lost ad revenues. So these are mostly publishers and related businesses, and they're saying that they cannot come peat against Google when it comes to the online ad business, which is a business that Google definitively dominates. I mean, you just can't deny that claim. It is obvious that Google dominates online advertising. But these companies also say that Google, through this domination, can essentially dictate pricing and other terms of ad deals, and that this affects the overall ad industry, that these other companies have no choice but to follow Google's lead because Google is so powerful and has so much weight in the industry that all terms are defined by Google, and that Google is acting more or less as a monopoly, at least as far as settling these terms. So the lawsuit argues that these smaller companies have had to sell ad space for much less than they should, losing out on up to of their AD revenue since January one, two thousand fourteen. Now we'll have to keep an eye on this lawsuit to see where it goes, But in general, this falls in line with this larger trend we've been seeing in tech as more regulators, politicians, and even smaller companies are pushing back against big text dominant position in various markets. Okay, that's the first section of tech News. We're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, it's everybody's favorite guy to talk about in tech. Things are about to get muskie, but first this break. Okay, we're back and it's time for the Elon Must section of the show. But this will be relatively short. We've only got a couple of stories. So first up, and this is a tiny one, but over in China, Tesla has had to issue a recall or recall, I guess that's how we should say that on more than four five thousand Tesla vehicles in order to address a problem with side marker lights on the cars, which were determined that you know, under extreme circumstances, could potentially contribute to catastrophic car accidents. But a recall ain't a recall, at least not like it was in the old days, because in this case, the recall is actually an over the air firmware update, So owners are not going to have to take their vehicles anywhere. They're not gonna have to go back to like the dealership or something and give up their car for any length of time. It'll actually be issued over the air, and it still qualifies as a recall legally, even though you know the drivers just it just means that their their lights will behave slightly differently from one day to the next. Honestly, I do think it's super cool that cars have reached a level of sophistication in which at least some issues can be fixed just by sending out an update and you don't have to take it back. It is kind of odd that we have this sort of antiquated system where we have to designate that as a recall. Because as much as I dog on Elon Musk and on Tesla. Uh. I don't think it's really fair to just say, hey, almost half a million Tesla's were recalled in China, because I feel like that paints a very inaccurate picture of what's actually happening. So I personally think we need to kind of update our definitions of what a recall is and isn't, or have some other term for these kinds of fixes where recall does not bring up this idea that people had to surrender their vehicles or that Tesla had to take them back or anything like that anyway. Next up is Neuralink, which is the Elon Musk backed company that is developing brain computer interfaces or BC eyes. Now, as Brain computer Interface suggests, this is a type of technology that would allow a human to interact with a comp you directly through thought through brain activity. And Elon Musk has been known to get all futuristic with this vision and talk about how one day human intelligence is going to merge with AI. To me, that sounds like he's kind of falling into the philosophy of Ray Kurtzwil, a known futurist who known famous futurist who has really pushed forward the idea of the singularity being on the horizon. I think he most recently said he thinks it will be here by two thousand forty five. I just can't shake the feeling that these really rich people are just terrified at the thought that one day they are going to cease to exist, so they're kind of feverishly predicting and hoping for a get out of death free card. Maybe I'm being totally unfair. I could just be so cynical and skeptical that that's how I feel about it now. But you know, they could be onto something, right. I mean, I don't want to dismiss the concept, but we are definitive, far, far far away from being able to merge AI with human intelligence. Musk did say he hopes that the neuralink interface will be implanted in a real human brain within six months or so, because so far the company has been testing this tech out on animals like monkeys and pigs. And to be clear, there are other bc I devices out there, including some that are, you know, attached to real human brains. People are really using these kind of interfaces to interact with computers for very specific use cases, and neural links design is particularly sophisticated. It's a really cool design and it has benefits over other implementations of this technology, including a smaller surgical footprint, which is obviously important. You want to reduce or ideally eliminate the risk of things like infection or surgery complications because you have to implant these things into brains, which means you've got to get to the brain, and that means going through either the skull or I saw one suggestion that had going through the jugular to feed a chip up into the brain. That way. Either way seems pretty extreme to me, right, And you know, it also is going to allow for wireless transmission of data because a lot of the BCIs that exist right now, you have to be tethered to a machine. Now in the case of b C I S the way we're seeing it used in a lot of cases are for people who have limited or no mobility, right So being tethered to a machine, while not ideal, also does not have a huge impact on quality of life in the sense that these are people who otherwise aren't capable of moving anyway. But what there are able to do now is to use thought to control electronics in some way, either by moving a cursor and typing things out, or some other form of communication where they're able to interact with their environments and with other people when previously they were not capable of doing that. And honestly, that is the use that I can get behind, and that's in fact what the Neuralalink teams are working toward. Really. Elon Musk is talking about AI and human intelligence merging, but these teams are looking at a more pragmatic approach and one that could have a transformative effect on a person's life who otherwise would be facing incredible challenges that most of us can't even imagine going through. To me, that is the inspiring thing about this technology, way way more energizing and and inspiring than thinking that one day I'll be able to complete the New York Times crossword puzzle and pen in just five minutes. I don't see that as being the huge benefit. And lastly, in our Muskie section, Terry Breton, and I don't know if I'm pronouncing that name correctly anyway, This is an EU official in charge of implementing the upcoming Digital Services Act or d s A in the EU once that Act has been finished and approved. That is it's still not complete anyway. Bretton has indicated that Twitter is going to have a lot of work to do in order to comply with EU laws to operate in the EU, the implication being that if Twitter fails to do that, it could potentially be banned from the EU. However, I should add that the EU really focuses on very large operating platforms or v lops, and as of now, Twitter has not yet been designated a v LAP, so it's possible that Twitter won't be won't be subject to the most restrictive rules in the EU. It still will have to follow some, but not maybe all, of the super tight restrictions. I'm sure that Musk would much prefer not having to follow every single restriction that will be coming up from the d s A. Elon Musk actually had a meeting with Breton and it seemed to go pretty well. Musk said that he thought that the rules were all very reasonable. But this puzzles me a bit simply because of what Musk says and what he's been doing appear to be at odds of each other. Because, like the d s A, is going to require transparent and thoughtful sets of policies on things, for example, like banning and unbanning accounts. But must just recently announced that, you know, thousands of banded accounts would be allowed back on Twitter, and there's nothing transparent or thoughtful about that approach it. It seems, at least on the outside, that Musk is ruling Twitter mostly by whim, which is antithetical to the requirements of the EU. But Musk also has said that he plans to hand control of Twitter over to some other CEO at some point in the future, So may be by the time the d s A is actually in full effect, it will be a moot point because Musk won't be the one calling the shots. I don't know. I just feel like the narratives here are are at cross purposes with one another. The two things cannot be an alignment based upon what we have seen so far with Musk's version of Twitter. But yeah, confusing stuff, and that is it. That's it for the Elon Musk section this week. Thank goodness. We do have a couple more stories Before we get to those. We're gonna take another quick break and we'll be right back. Okay, got a few more to wrap up. Andy Jase, this CEO of Amazon has indicated that the Prime video streaming unit of Amazon could potentially spin off to become its own company. This really confused me at first, because, like the headlines were saying Prime to become standalone owned company, and Prime refers not just to the streaming video service but to the Amazon Prime program, which is one that gets you like free shipping and all that kind of stuff for a yearly subscription. But yeah, anyway, he said this during an interview during the deal Book Summit, which just concluded. A lot of stuff happened there, including some stuff about f t X and its implosion, but I don't want to get into all that. Maybe I'll talk about that and into the year episode. So it would be interesting to see Prime Video kind of spinoff and become its own standalone company. But I've got a lot of questions. For example, if the video streaming division becomes a standalone company, would that mean an Amazon Prime membership would no longer serve as access to the streaming content on the standalone company the separate company, or would Prime members be able to use their membership both on Amazon and the standalone video a service. If not, would that mean they'd have to subscribe to yet another streaming service. I don't know the answer to this. These are all just hypothetical questions. Anyway, Jesse did not outright say that this is definitely going to happen. He just said that over time the company has looked at opportunities to follow this kind of approach, so I wouldn't be surprised to see it happen. I am very curious about the implementation and whether or not that would affect how you access either the Amazon Prime features that have become very popular at Amazon or the streaming video, because if they split that out, then they're gonna be people asking questions like, well, are you going to reduce the cost of Amazon Prime them? Because if I'm not getting the streaming video, then you're taking stuff away from the subscription, So why would I pay as much when you're taking things away? These are all questions that I just don't have answers to. Now. I'm sure most of y'all are familiar with the concept of focus groups and entertainment. These groups, which usually consist of you know, just average people, are gathered together by market analysts, end up watching early cuts of shows or films, and then they give feedback to studio representatives, who might then take that feedback and send it to producers, who might then phone up directors and demand that the directors make the movie less sad or whatever, you know, like, hey, what if Old Yeller just gets better by the end. That kind of thing. Now, in some cases, focus groups can really help set a project on the right path, Like maybe it turns out that motives are muddled and people don't understand why characters are doing things, and it wasn't the intent of the director for that to happen, it's just how it came out in the edit. Well, if people are confused, it may not be a very satisfying experience. Maybe it's something the director can fix even by having an alternative edit, or maybe they have to go and do reshoots. Those can all be good things, but it also could lead to a director's vision being totally compromised. We've heard stories of that to where a director essentially loses all control of a film or an editor, and because really, when you get down to it, the finished film, the editor's touch is at least as important as the directors, sometimes more important. Anyway, all that aside, Netflix is actually going to expand its focus group program right now that consists of around two thousand subscribers who are allowed to watch Netflix original content early and give feedback on it. So the company plans to expand this to quote tens of thousands of users around the world end quote, and that's going to happen starting early next year. So if you're a Netflix subscriber, maybe you'll become a tastemaker. Then you can be the one to tell Tim Burton, hey, please stop messing with the Adams family's interpersonal dynamics so much. Or Tega is doing a phenomenal job, but you're messing with one of the greatest families and American fiction. Stop it. I might be projecting. Rolls Royce, the aviation company, not the luxury car, recently demonstrated a jet engine using hydrogen as fuel. So the engine was a Rolls Royce A twenty one A and it was modified to accept hydrogen as combustion fuel. And you know, hydrogen can be used as combustible fuel, but it can also be used in stuff like fuel cells. Fuel cells use a totally different physical process from combustion, and Garzia Vitadini, the CTO of Rolls Royce, said, quote we are pushing the boundaries to discover the zero carbon possibilities of hydrogen, which could help reshape the future of flight. End quote. Now, it is true that burning hydrogen does not produce carbon dioxide, so that's great, But I will have more to say about combusting in a little second. Further rolls. Royce said that they got the hydrogen by relying on renewable energy. This is also critically important. So hydrogen is the most abundant element in our galaxy, but hydrogen also bonds with other elements very very readily, and it forms compounds. Uh it. We typically do not encounter hydrogen in its pure form. If we did, and we could just harness it, things would be way easier. Instead, we have to harvest hydrogen from some other source. Now, one way to do this is to add kind of a secondary process to something like natural gas mining operations, because that produces a lot of hydrogen in the process. However, if we do that, then we tie our source of hydrogen to ongoing fossil fuels operations. That really just extends our reliance on fossil fuels, right, and said of it, saying like, let's let's move away from relying on fossil fuels and depend more on sources like hydrogen. It says, oh, well, while we're depending on fossil fuels, let's also get hydrogen. That means that we become less less likely to just move off of fossil fuels entirely. So really, any solution quote unquote that just assumes that fossil fuels are still going to be part of the picture is not great, generally speaking from an environmental perspective. But that's not the only way to get hydrogen. Another source of hydrogen is water. You know, good old h that's the hydrogen to oh two hydrogen atoms to every oxygen atom. If you run an electric current through water, you can break those molecular bonds and you release oxygen and you release hydrogen. But in order to do that, you have to generate an electrical current, right, you have to use energy to do this to break these molecular bonds. So Rolls Royce was looking at renewable energy systems like wind turbines and uh and and tidal turbines to generate the electricity needed to harvest the hydrogen. So that way they're not relying on like a coal powered power plant. Right, So that's good. That's a pretty good ecosystem to get your hydrogen through means that are not carbon emission systems. But here's where we start to encounter a problem because, yeah, burning hydrogen doesn't create carbon dioxide. However, burning hydrogen in our atmosphere, specifically at higher temperatures, does create other byproducts. Now, the main byproduct is water, and people say, oh, well water, that's that's fine, right, It's just water, and that's true. But it also at high temperatures can create nitrogen oxides. You know, because there's a lot of nitrogen in our atmosphere, nitrogen and oxygen, So burning at these high temperatures can, as a byproduct, produced nitrogen oxides that is also a pollutant. It can cause respiratory problems. It's a big contributor to stuff like smog. So while you could convincingly argue that using hydrogen and jet engines is cleaner than typical jet fuel, I'd have to look at all the analysis to make that conclusion. But it seems, you know, sensible, It's still not totally free of pollutants, and I think it's a heck of an engineering achievement. Don't get me wrong. I think it's a great engineering achievement, and I don't want to to diminish that or dismiss it or anything like that. But I also don't want to ignore one pollutant just because this new approach could eliminate emissions of some other pollutant. Right, we have to keep the whole picture in mind. Otherwise we just trade one problem for a different problem. If we're able to reconcile all of at and to determine, okay, well, does this approach make sense? Um is the pollutant significant? If it's not significant, then maybe it makes perfect sense to go this way. But if it is significant, if all we're doing is trading carbon emissions for nitrogen oxide emissions, then we still have some tough questions we have to answer. Still, Anything that is pushing us away from fossil fuels and toward an approach that is less environmentally dangerous, I think is ultimately a good thing. And that's it. That's it for this news episode of tech Stuff. Hope you are all well. As I said earlier this week, I am working on an end of the year kind of wrap up of the big news stories that unfolded in tech in two, if you have any favorites that you would like me to cover, let me know. Uh, some of the major stuff I'm obviously going to tackle, like Elon Musk, Twitter obviously is going to have to play a part in that. Meta's crisis is gonna play a part in that um But you know, if there are specific stories that happened within tech that you think are really important, even if they weren't necessarily huge, but you think they have important implementations for tech or consumers or anything like that, feel free to let me know. You can get in touch in a couple of different ways. One way is you can download the I Heart radio app and you can navigate over to the tech Stuff page. You just put that in the search field and there you will see a little microphone icon. If you click on the microphone icon, you can leave a voice message up to thirty seconds in length. 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Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. He there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio. And how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for a Thursday, December one, two thousand twenty two. Where did the year go? Yet again? I at the end of a year. I feel like the previous year both lasted an eternity and was over in the blink of an eye. I don't know how that is possible. I guess it's cause Einstein found out time is relative. Man, that guy was the worst. Okay, let's get to it. I am I'm kidding about Einstein. Let's get to the tech news so far this week, and um, it's getting little quiet, which is fine. Usually we do see tech news quiet down towards the end of the year, gearing up to c e s and then things get back into crazy town. So, first up, we have a scary situation here in the United States. I think it's pretty well understood by just about everybody that cyber attacks and cyber warfare are a constant threat. Really, they're constantly happening, whether it's from state sponsored hacking groups that are working on behalf of a government, or quote unquote independent groups that claim to merely be aligned with some nations goals but not actually you know, sponsored by that nation, or maybe it's a cyber criminal organization. But we've seen tons of attacks on various high profile targets all around the world. Well, the scary thing I read is that, according to cybersecurity researchers, eighty seven per cent of US defense contractors failed to meet basic cybersecurity regulations. Eighty seven per cent failed. That is a sobering thought. Infosecurity Magazines James Coker explains that to get a passing grade, they must achieve a score of seventy on the Supplier Risk Performance System as designed by the Pentagon. Only of defense contractors managed to do that. By the way, to be considered fully compliant, you would have to achieve a score of one ten. So yeah, this is a little like flunking your big math test, except in this case, your math test describes how prepared you are for cyber attacks and security intrusions. And considering we're talking about key contractors in the supply chain for the U. S Department of Defense, and that We've had so much conversation of the last two years about importance and delicacy of supply chains. This is a huge problem now, y'all. I have complained in the past about how the average person it's pretty bad at practicing basic infosecurity measures, but this is unfathomable to me. You would think that these companies, given the business that they are in, would be particularly careful, as they would clearly be high profile targets for hackers. But it appears the opposite is true now. In James Coker's article, which is called majority of US defense contractors not meeting basic cybersecurity requirements, well, he explains part of the problem is that traditionally the US government hasn't been super good at cracking down on these requirements. And you know, you just have to look at kids to know if a rule is not being enforced, well, you might just feel like there's no need to observe the rule in the first place, Like it's almost the same as no rule being there at all. Coker also points out that some of these contractors are, you know, smaller companies, They're not like huge defense contractors, and not all of them have the assets or experience or knowledge base that you find in some of the larger organizations, and that the learning curve to adopting proper security measures is a pretty steep one. It can be tough to do, and that may well be the case, but I maintain that when you consider the potential consequences of a security intrusion into the supply chain of national defense, having to buckle down in order to meet regulations is a tiny price to pay. While we're on the subject of infosecurity, I have in the past recommended that people adopt password vault systems so that they can create and store strong passwords for all the online services they use, and I still think that's a really good idea. I use one myself. You know you don't want to reu is the same password at all? You don't. I mean, you might want to for the sake of convenience, but you don't for the sake of security. You also want each of your passwords to be difficult to guess, and that means making each password really hard to remember. Because by difficult to guess, we're not just talking about for humans. We're talking about for computers too. Now you can do something really clever like you can pick say, three unrelated words for each service, and you string these three words together and that makes your password. This is actually a really good way to make a strong password. But even then, as you add more passwords, like as you have more and more services that you're doing this for, it can get a little tricky to remember which string of words you used for which service. So password vaults help out in this case, right, Typically you use one master password in order to access the vault, and then everything else is stored in the vault so you don't have to remember it well. One such password vault is last Pass, and unfortunately, hackers were able to access a cloud storage service used by last pass, and they were able to access quote unquote certain elements of last pass users information. Now, there hasn't really been any clarification on what that means exactly, like what information was accessed, and very little on if anything was even you know, taken. But presumably any passwords accessed are heavily encrypted, which at the very least makes it unlikely that the hackers are able to do anything with the information they stole, at least not right away. Further, last Pass says it does not store master passwords at all. That instead, when you put in your master password, it goes through what's called a one way salted hash. So this is an encryption process that is not reversible, and it generates this jumble of characters that can then be used as a key. Anyway, if you use last Pass, you might want to look in to see just you know what, if anything the service is recommending you do. It might be to change your master password, which you know you should be doing on the rag anyway, and I still think password vaults are a critical security tool for the average person. By the way, I actually use one myself. I used to use last Pass, but now I use a different one, So I mean I didn't have any issues with last Pass, I just kind of switched to a different service. But yeah, I still think that they're all, you know, important elements to personal data security. A few weeks back, the Washington Post published an article linking a software company to a US military contractor that raised a lot of eyebrows. So this software company is called trust Core Systems. That's a t R U S t c O R Systems, and it's in the business of issuing digital certificates, which is an important part of making sure that the sites you visit are in fact legitimate. So certificates are what tell browsers that a site is trustworthy, that there's been this designated authority or hundreds of them actually that ends up generating this certificate that says, yes, you can trust this website. So there are hundreds of these companies that you know, issue these kinds of certificates, and trust Core is one of them. But according to the Washington Post, trust Core has the same slate of officers, agents and partners as a company that's been known to make spywear and is in turn connected to a defense company called Packet Forensics. Now, when you hear the name packet Forensics, that suggests a company that's in the business of analyzing data transmissions, possibly to intercept communications and pass intelligence along to US government agencies. So this starts to paint a pretty ugly picture. You've got a company it's in charge of certifying trustworthiness that's tied to a company that is effectively spying on digital transmissions. The association has been enough for both Microsoft and Mozilla to stop trusting certificates from trust Core, which kind of seems to have an ironic name now doesn't it, and other browsers are likely to follow a suit anyway. Everybody's a spy, kind of like how in the john Wick movies everybody is an assassin. I mean, seriously, the entire economy in the john Wick universe must be assassin based. I guess that's a discussion for a different podcast. Across the pond, in the UK, more than one hundred thousand small businesses have joined in a class action lawsuit against Google, and they are seeking more than thirteen point five billion British pounds and lost ad revenues. So these are mostly publishers and related businesses, and they're saying that they cannot come peat against Google when it comes to the online ad business, which is a business that Google definitively dominates. I mean, you just can't deny that claim. It is obvious that Google dominates online advertising. But these companies also say that Google, through this domination, can essentially dictate pricing and other terms of ad deals, and that this affects the overall ad industry, that these other companies have no choice but to follow Google's lead because Google is so powerful and has so much weight in the industry that all terms are defined by Google, and that Google is acting more or less as a monopoly, at least as far as settling these terms. So the lawsuit argues that these smaller companies have had to sell ad space for much less than they should, losing out on up to of their AD revenue since January one, two thousand fourteen. Now we'll have to keep an eye on this lawsuit to see where it goes, But in general, this falls in line with this larger trend we've been seeing in tech as more regulators, politicians, and even smaller companies are pushing back against big text dominant position in various markets. Okay, that's the first section of tech News. We're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, it's everybody's favorite guy to talk about in tech. Things are about to get muskie, but first this break. Okay, we're back and it's time for the Elon Must section of the show. But this will be relatively short. We've only got a couple of stories. So first up, and this is a tiny one, but over in China, Tesla has had to issue a recall or recall, I guess that's how we should say that on more than four five thousand Tesla vehicles in order to address a problem with side marker lights on the cars, which were determined that you know, under extreme circumstances, could potentially contribute to catastrophic car accidents. But a recall ain't a recall, at least not like it was in the old days, because in this case, the recall is actually an over the air firmware update, So owners are not going to have to take their vehicles anywhere. They're not gonna have to go back to like the dealership or something and give up their car for any length of time. It'll actually be issued over the air, and it still qualifies as a recall legally, even though you know the drivers just it just means that their their lights will behave slightly differently from one day to the next. Honestly, I do think it's super cool that cars have reached a level of sophistication in which at least some issues can be fixed just by sending out an update and you don't have to take it back. It is kind of odd that we have this sort of antiquated system where we have to designate that as a recall. Because as much as I dog on Elon Musk and on Tesla. Uh. I don't think it's really fair to just say, hey, almost half a million Tesla's were recalled in China, because I feel like that paints a very inaccurate picture of what's actually happening. So I personally think we need to kind of update our definitions of what a recall is and isn't, or have some other term for these kinds of fixes where recall does not bring up this idea that people had to surrender their vehicles or that Tesla had to take them back or anything like that anyway. Next up is Neuralink, which is the Elon Musk backed company that is developing brain computer interfaces or BC eyes. Now, as Brain computer Interface suggests, this is a type of technology that would allow a human to interact with a comp you directly through thought through brain activity. And Elon Musk has been known to get all futuristic with this vision and talk about how one day human intelligence is going to merge with AI. To me, that sounds like he's kind of falling into the philosophy of Ray Kurtzwil, a known futurist who known famous futurist who has really pushed forward the idea of the singularity being on the horizon. I think he most recently said he thinks it will be here by two thousand forty five. I just can't shake the feeling that these really rich people are just terrified at the thought that one day they are going to cease to exist, so they're kind of feverishly predicting and hoping for a get out of death free card. Maybe I'm being totally unfair. I could just be so cynical and skeptical that that's how I feel about it now. But you know, they could be onto something, right. I mean, I don't want to dismiss the concept, but we are definitive, far, far far away from being able to merge AI with human intelligence. Musk did say he hopes that the neuralink interface will be implanted in a real human brain within six months or so, because so far the company has been testing this tech out on animals like monkeys and pigs. And to be clear, there are other bc I devices out there, including some that are, you know, attached to real human brains. People are really using these kind of interfaces to interact with computers for very specific use cases, and neural links design is particularly sophisticated. It's a really cool design and it has benefits over other implementations of this technology, including a smaller surgical footprint, which is obviously important. You want to reduce or ideally eliminate the risk of things like infection or surgery complications because you have to implant these things into brains, which means you've got to get to the brain, and that means going through either the skull or I saw one suggestion that had going through the jugular to feed a chip up into the brain. That way. Either way seems pretty extreme to me, right, And you know, it also is going to allow for wireless transmission of data because a lot of the BCIs that exist right now, you have to be tethered to a machine. Now in the case of b C I S the way we're seeing it used in a lot of cases are for people who have limited or no mobility, right So being tethered to a machine, while not ideal, also does not have a huge impact on quality of life in the sense that these are people who otherwise aren't capable of moving anyway. But what there are able to do now is to use thought to control electronics in some way, either by moving a cursor and typing things out, or some other form of communication where they're able to interact with their environments and with other people when previously they were not capable of doing that. And honestly, that is the use that I can get behind, and that's in fact what the Neuralalink teams are working toward. Really. Elon Musk is talking about AI and human intelligence merging, but these teams are looking at a more pragmatic approach and one that could have a transformative effect on a person's life who otherwise would be facing incredible challenges that most of us can't even imagine going through. To me, that is the inspiring thing about this technology, way way more energizing and and inspiring than thinking that one day I'll be able to complete the New York Times crossword puzzle and pen in just five minutes. I don't see that as being the huge benefit. And lastly, in our Muskie section, Terry Breton, and I don't know if I'm pronouncing that name correctly anyway, This is an EU official in charge of implementing the upcoming Digital Services Act or d s A in the EU once that Act has been finished and approved. That is it's still not complete anyway. Bretton has indicated that Twitter is going to have a lot of work to do in order to comply with EU laws to operate in the EU, the implication being that if Twitter fails to do that, it could potentially be banned from the EU. However, I should add that the EU really focuses on very large operating platforms or v lops, and as of now, Twitter has not yet been designated a v LAP, so it's possible that Twitter won't be won't be subject to the most restrictive rules in the EU. It still will have to follow some, but not maybe all, of the super tight restrictions. I'm sure that Musk would much prefer not having to follow every single restriction that will be coming up from the d s A. Elon Musk actually had a meeting with Breton and it seemed to go pretty well. Musk said that he thought that the rules were all very reasonable. But this puzzles me a bit simply because of what Musk says and what he's been doing appear to be at odds of each other. Because, like the d s A, is going to require transparent and thoughtful sets of policies on things, for example, like banning and unbanning accounts. But must just recently announced that, you know, thousands of banded accounts would be allowed back on Twitter, and there's nothing transparent or thoughtful about that approach it. It seems, at least on the outside, that Musk is ruling Twitter mostly by whim, which is antithetical to the requirements of the EU. But Musk also has said that he plans to hand control of Twitter over to some other CEO at some point in the future, So may be by the time the d s A is actually in full effect, it will be a moot point because Musk won't be the one calling the shots. I don't know. I just feel like the narratives here are are at cross purposes with one another. The two things cannot be an alignment based upon what we have seen so far with Musk's version of Twitter. But yeah, confusing stuff, and that is it. That's it for the Elon Musk section this week. Thank goodness. We do have a couple more stories Before we get to those. We're gonna take another quick break and we'll be right back. Okay, got a few more to wrap up. Andy Jase, this CEO of Amazon has indicated that the Prime video streaming unit of Amazon could potentially spin off to become its own company. This really confused me at first, because, like the headlines were saying Prime to become standalone owned company, and Prime refers not just to the streaming video service but to the Amazon Prime program, which is one that gets you like free shipping and all that kind of stuff for a yearly subscription. But yeah, anyway, he said this during an interview during the deal Book Summit, which just concluded. A lot of stuff happened there, including some stuff about f t X and its implosion, but I don't want to get into all that. Maybe I'll talk about that and into the year episode. So it would be interesting to see Prime Video kind of spinoff and become its own standalone company. But I've got a lot of questions. For example, if the video streaming division becomes a standalone company, would that mean an Amazon Prime membership would no longer serve as access to the streaming content on the standalone company the separate company, or would Prime members be able to use their membership both on Amazon and the standalone video a service. If not, would that mean they'd have to subscribe to yet another streaming service. I don't know the answer to this. These are all just hypothetical questions. Anyway, Jesse did not outright say that this is definitely going to happen. He just said that over time the company has looked at opportunities to follow this kind of approach, so I wouldn't be surprised to see it happen. I am very curious about the implementation and whether or not that would affect how you access either the Amazon Prime features that have become very popular at Amazon or the streaming video, because if they split that out, then they're gonna be people asking questions like, well, are you going to reduce the cost of Amazon Prime them? Because if I'm not getting the streaming video, then you're taking stuff away from the subscription, So why would I pay as much when you're taking things away? These are all questions that I just don't have answers to. Now. I'm sure most of y'all are familiar with the concept of focus groups and entertainment. These groups, which usually consist of you know, just average people, are gathered together by market analysts, end up watching early cuts of shows or films, and then they give feedback to studio representatives, who might then take that feedback and send it to producers, who might then phone up directors and demand that the directors make the movie less sad or whatever, you know, like, hey, what if Old Yeller just gets better by the end. That kind of thing. Now, in some cases, focus groups can really help set a project on the right path, Like maybe it turns out that motives are muddled and people don't understand why characters are doing things, and it wasn't the intent of the director for that to happen, it's just how it came out in the edit. Well, if people are confused, it may not be a very satisfying experience. Maybe it's something the director can fix even by having an alternative edit, or maybe they have to go and do reshoots. Those can all be good things, but it also could lead to a director's vision being totally compromised. We've heard stories of that to where a director essentially loses all control of a film or an editor, and because really, when you get down to it, the finished film, the editor's touch is at least as important as the directors, sometimes more important. Anyway, all that aside, Netflix is actually going to expand its focus group program right now that consists of around two thousand subscribers who are allowed to watch Netflix original content early and give feedback on it. So the company plans to expand this to quote tens of thousands of users around the world end quote, and that's going to happen starting early next year. So if you're a Netflix subscriber, maybe you'll become a tastemaker. Then you can be the one to tell Tim Burton, hey, please stop messing with the Adams family's interpersonal dynamics so much. Or Tega is doing a phenomenal job, but you're messing with one of the greatest families and American fiction. Stop it. I might be projecting. Rolls Royce, the aviation company, not the luxury car, recently demonstrated a jet engine using hydrogen as fuel. So the engine was a Rolls Royce A twenty one A and it was modified to accept hydrogen as combustion fuel. And you know, hydrogen can be used as combustible fuel, but it can also be used in stuff like fuel cells. Fuel cells use a totally different physical process from combustion, and Garzia Vitadini, the CTO of Rolls Royce, said, quote we are pushing the boundaries to discover the zero carbon possibilities of hydrogen, which could help reshape the future of flight. End quote. Now, it is true that burning hydrogen does not produce carbon dioxide, so that's great, But I will have more to say about combusting in a little second. Further rolls. Royce said that they got the hydrogen by relying on renewable energy. This is also critically important. So hydrogen is the most abundant element in our galaxy, but hydrogen also bonds with other elements very very readily, and it forms compounds. Uh it. We typically do not encounter hydrogen in its pure form. If we did, and we could just harness it, things would be way easier. Instead, we have to harvest hydrogen from some other source. Now, one way to do this is to add kind of a secondary process to something like natural gas mining operations, because that produces a lot of hydrogen in the process. However, if we do that, then we tie our source of hydrogen to ongoing fossil fuels operations. That really just extends our reliance on fossil fuels, right, and said of it, saying like, let's let's move away from relying on fossil fuels and depend more on sources like hydrogen. It says, oh, well, while we're depending on fossil fuels, let's also get hydrogen. That means that we become less less likely to just move off of fossil fuels entirely. So really, any solution quote unquote that just assumes that fossil fuels are still going to be part of the picture is not great, generally speaking from an environmental perspective. But that's not the only way to get hydrogen. Another source of hydrogen is water. You know, good old h that's the hydrogen to oh two hydrogen atoms to every oxygen atom. If you run an electric current through water, you can break those molecular bonds and you release oxygen and you release hydrogen. But in order to do that, you have to generate an electrical current, right, you have to use energy to do this to break these molecular bonds. So Rolls Royce was looking at renewable energy systems like wind turbines and uh and and tidal turbines to generate the electricity needed to harvest the hydrogen. So that way they're not relying on like a coal powered power plant. Right, So that's good. That's a pretty good ecosystem to get your hydrogen through means that are not carbon emission systems. But here's where we start to encounter a problem because, yeah, burning hydrogen doesn't create carbon dioxide. However, burning hydrogen in our atmosphere, specifically at higher temperatures, does create other byproducts. Now, the main byproduct is water, and people say, oh, well water, that's that's fine, right, It's just water, and that's true. But it also at high temperatures can create nitrogen oxides. You know, because there's a lot of nitrogen in our atmosphere, nitrogen and oxygen, So burning at these high temperatures can, as a byproduct, produced nitrogen oxides that is also a pollutant. It can cause respiratory problems. It's a big contributor to stuff like smog. So while you could convincingly argue that using hydrogen and jet engines is cleaner than typical jet fuel, I'd have to look at all the analysis to make that conclusion. But it seems, you know, sensible, It's still not totally free of pollutants, and I think it's a heck of an engineering achievement. Don't get me wrong. I think it's a great engineering achievement, and I don't want to to diminish that or dismiss it or anything like that. But I also don't want to ignore one pollutant just because this new approach could eliminate emissions of some other pollutant. Right, we have to keep the whole picture in mind. Otherwise we just trade one problem for a different problem. If we're able to reconcile all of at and to determine, okay, well, does this approach make sense? Um is the pollutant significant? If it's not significant, then maybe it makes perfect sense to go this way. But if it is significant, if all we're doing is trading carbon emissions for nitrogen oxide emissions, then we still have some tough questions we have to answer. Still, Anything that is pushing us away from fossil fuels and toward an approach that is less environmentally dangerous, I think is ultimately a good thing. And that's it. That's it for this news episode of tech Stuff. Hope you are all well. As I said earlier this week, I am working on an end of the year kind of wrap up of the big news stories that unfolded in tech in two, if you have any favorites that you would like me to cover, let me know. Uh, some of the major stuff I'm obviously going to tackle, like Elon Musk, Twitter obviously is going to have to play a part in that. Meta's crisis is gonna play a part in that um But you know, if there are specific stories that happened within tech that you think are really important, even if they weren't necessarily huge, but you think they have important implementations for tech or consumers or anything like that, feel free to let me know. You can get in touch in a couple of different ways. One way is you can download the I Heart radio app and you can navigate over to the tech Stuff page. You just put that in the search field and there you will see a little microphone icon. If you click on the microphone icon, you can leave a voice message up to thirty seconds in length. Let me know what you think. If you would like me to play the message in a future episode of Tech Stuff, just let me know that as well. I will only do it if you tell me it's okay. The other way, if you don't want to talk into a microphone, and I understand if that's how you feel, You can leave me a message on Twitter to handle for the show is tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text 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.