Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from my 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 Thursday, December twenty two. And you know, I do news episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and every time a Thursday rolls around, I worry that I'm not gonna have enough material to really do a decent episode. But that is definitely not a problem. Today we have a ton to talk about, including some updates on stories that we've chatted about in previous news episodes, including Tuesdays. So let's begin with f t X. Now, I'm not gonna do a full catch up on f t X because I actually did that on Tuesday's episode. So if you don't know what f t X is and you want to know, I recommend just listening to the first five minutes or so of Tuesday's show and then that'll get you up to speed. So first up is the matter of Sam Bankman Freed or SBF. He's a co founder of the cryptocurrency exchange f t X, so he was arrested on Monday evening, which I talked about on Tuesday's episode. But now we've learned that if he's convicted of the crimes he stands accused of, he could face a maximum of a hundred fifteen years in prison. He could spend the rest of his life in prison. He has eight federal counts against him. Those charges range from wire fraud to securities fraud to money laundering. Now, all that being said, I think it is highly unlikely he'll face anything close to a hundred fifteen years. Uh, He's still likely to end up with a prison sentence, perhaps a considerable one, like ten years or so. But one challenge for the prosecution is proving beyond a reasonable doubt that SPF was committing fraud. So here in the United States, we have a saying that goes ignorance of the law is no excuse. Now, generally, what that means is that if you unknowingly break a law, it still means you broke a law, and you can still be held accountable for it. Being ignorant of law does not excuse you from accountability. However, there are a few crimes that require things like intent and understanding to be considered a crime. So fraud is an example fraud, at least in some jurisdictions. Fraud is a crime that carries with it the concept of intent that you intended to defraud someone. If you did not intend to do it and it happened by accident, then it's not really fraud at least in those jurisdictions. It could still be some other crime, but it would not be fraud. There are other examples of crimes where intent makes a different. So that's what separates something like voluntary manslaughter from involuntary manslaughter. Is intent. Anyway, I think the odds are at least some charges will stick to SBF and he's going to be looking at a prison sentence of at least a few years, just I don't expect the hundred fifteen max to to fall on his shoulders. Meanwhile, f t X is in the process of going through bankruptcy, and really what they're going through is liquidating assets and trying to recapture as much value as they can to return to creditors and investors. So Tuesday I mentioned how the government of the Bahamas wanted to get involved in how certain f t X assets are being handled because f t X established headquarters in the Bahamas a while back, and SPF and one of his buddies bought thirty five properties around New Providence, Bahamas, and in total those properties value at around two fifty million dollars. You've got a couple of branches of f t X that are involved in this as well. There's f t X, the American company. There's f t X Digital Markets that's the Bahamanian branch of f t X. And what the American branch of f t X is essentially saying is we don't want to share any information with f t X Digital Markets because we don't trust the government of the Bahamas and we worry that the government will steal stuff that we're trying to liquidate, that they will lean on ft X Digital Markets and get that information, and then our investors will not get the value that they deserve. Meanwhile, ft X Digital is saying this is nonsense. We were appointed by a court order and our job is to liquidate assets to recover money for investors and creditors too. But we do that unless we actually have access to data. So our job is the same as your job is essentially what they're saying, then you have the government of the Bahamas and it's like, hey, it's against the law for matters involving Bahamanian land to be arbitrated outside of the Bahamas. So it's a big old mess. In other words, Ultimately, the only job FTX really has right now is to get as much value from whatever assets it has and to then hand that over to the creditors and the investors. So it's no surprise that we're seeing this kind of tug of war between the branches as well as the Bahamanian government. So yeah, everybody feels like they're owed a piece of this, and so there's gonna be probably some pretty nasty arguments about how it needs to be divvied up, because there are a lot of people who are holding the bag right now and they don't. They don't want to They don't want to be holding the bag. If anything, they want that bag to be very very small, if they have to hold a bag at all. So yeah, this isn't over with. Then. Over at Binance, which is the largest cryptocurrency exchange, it's also an entity that had let's say, a contentious relationship with f t X. The CEO of Binance is trying to calm matters. Internally, his name's Chong Peng Zoo. He's also known as c Z because we just love initialisms in crypto. And he sent a memo to employees and acknowledge that folks have recently withdrawn a lot of money from Finance, more than a billion dollars in one day. Some estimates say that in the week leading up to yesterday that customers have removed more than three and a half billion dollars from the exchange. But he says, you know, this happens like there are days where we might have a billion in deposits in other days where you might have a billion in withdrawals. It's not a cause for alarm. He did also warn that crypto in general is in for rough time, but quote, this organization was built to last. As long as we continue to offer users the best product, user experience, and frictionless trading environment, Finance will survive any crypto winter end. Quote Now, as I mentioned on Tuesday, Binance is also the subject of a US Department of Justice investigation. There are concerns that some of the shenanigans that we're going on at f t X are also happening over at Binance, including like ten billion dollars of illegal payments processing. While Binance did commission a report from a third party to be more transparent about the company's reserves, that report has not satisfied everyone out there, So this too, is a developing story. Another developing story revolves around the US government's stance on TikTok. So on Tuesday, I talked about how there are some proposals developing in Congress that would ban TikTok in the United States unless the company becomes a true the US based business, essentially cutting all ties to China because right now TikTok is a subsidiary of a Chinese company called byte Dance. Well, now the U s Senate has voted to ban federal employees from installing TikTok on government owned devices. Now, this is obviously not like a nationwide ban on TikTok for everybody. It's rather another display of how government officials are worried that TikTok the video platform could be used by the Chinese Communist Party as a way to gather information about people in the US, something that TikTok reps have denied repeatedly in the past. A few state governments have already passed similar laws for state government employees, so this federal vote will also have to pass the House of Representatives before it can then be sent to President Biden's office for his signature, which would be interesting to see because Biden and his administration have been an active negotiations with to Talk in an effort to find a way where TikTok can operate within the US without fear of it serving as spyware for China. Now, personally, I actually think it's okay to tell federal government employees, hey, if the phone belongs to the federal government, don't put TikTok on the phone. You can save TikTok for your own personal device. Now, maybe that's because I also think it would be weird for a lot of companies to say, oh, sure, go ahead and put TikTok on your corporate device. I think it's totally fair for a corporation and say, hey, you know, just don't You can do it for your own personal one, but for your work phone, don't put it on there. I think the same thing should be true for government employees. But then, as I have said many times, I am old and grouchy and I'm only getting more so with every passing day. Now. Speaking of TikTok, the Center for Countering Digital Hate released a report that claims TikTok's algorithm is regularly serving up harmful in the sial to young users. So researchers with the organization created accounts fake accounts on TikTok. So the accounts claimed to be representing a thirteen year old user. That's the minimum age that you can be on TikTok. They then chose mental health, embody image as areas of interest. With one of these accounts they used a female user name, and the other one they used the user name that had lose weight as part of the name, just to see if that would have any effect on the content they received. And according to the researchers, it took less than three minutes before they started to encounter content related to suicide and within eight minutes they started seeing content about eating disorders. And when I say content about, I mean content promoting these things, not content raising awareness about them. Are trying to counsel people or to prevent problems, but rather to incite them. So the researchers said it was clear that TikTok algorithm was amplifying these harmful messages and that the effect on young users could be really dangerous. It could contribute to mental health issues. Now, behind the scenes, what appears to be going on is that TikTok's algorithm selects from content that the algorithm estimates will be of interest to the user. When something is a hit, the algorithm looks for similar content, and by a hit, I mean did did a person watch the video all the way through? So as you spend more time paying attention to certain types of content, what the algorithm is doing is just trying to serve up similar content to you in the thought that this will keep you on TikTok longer. So at best you could say that the algorithm is ultimately content agnostic. It's not necessarily trying to harm anyone, but it's not trying to save anyone either. Instead, it's just trying to keep people on the app for as long as possible. And if terrible traumatic content is what's keeping someone on there, well it's just gonna keep on sending that content on. So if people are watching videos that contain harmful messages, they'll keep getting more of those. And again, the issue here is one of amplification. It's not so much that you're you know, shouldn't be allowed to say bad things, although you should always know that consequences can come from saying bad things, but that it's the artificial amplification of those messages and the potential harm that can cause two users. So it's similar to problems that we've seen on other platforms like Facebook, where recommendation algorithms have played a big part in, say, the proliferation of misinformation. I'm sure these kinds of studies will fuel more efforts on the regulatory and government side as well. A lot of that focus has been on the potential use of TikTok as spywear essentially, but some of it is also on a concern about how it could be affecting the mental health of users, particularly young users. There's a lot of armchair psychology too about whether or not TikTok is absolutely ruining attention spans and making it impossible for younger people to pay attention to anything that lasts longer than a few seconds. Uh. Again, I don't have any actual hard data on that. I don't know if that's really the case. If it is, I'm doomed because all these episodes are long. Alright, with that, we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, we've got some more news. Okay, we're back. So Tesla's stock price hit their lowest point in two years yesterday. Reuters sites investors who are concerned that CEO Elon Musk is spending too much of his time and energy over at Twitter, which you know, at least from the surface, appears to be a valid concern. According to filings with the U S Securities and Exchange Commission or the SEC, Elon Musk himself offloaded millions of his own personal shares of Tesla. Now, keep in mind, Musk is still the majority owner of Tesla. He still has the more most shares of anybody, So while he sold off millions, he's got millions more. But the value of the stocks he sold off, according to those filings, was three point five billion dollars yauza. Now, generally speaking, when a CEO sells off large chunks of their own shares of the company, they're they're headed um. Investors can get a little worried because sometimes they'll take it as a sign that the CEO foresees troubled waters ahead. And that the CEO has lost confidence in their own business. However, in this case, Musk's ongoing Twitter issues maybe playing a part in his decision to sell off stocks. But because Twitter has billions of dollars of debt and massive interest payments coming in off that debt, and the banks that helped Musk secure financing for his purchase of Twitter have reportedly been looking at margin loans on Musk's Tesla stock, and the declining price of the stock is likely not a welcome site to those banks. But with all that being said, I just checked the Tesla stock as I'm recording this episode, and it's currently trading at a hundred fifty seven dollars, so it's up slightly from its low of around a hundred fifty six dollars. So it could be that Musk's cashing out of those stocks won't have as big a ripple as some might suspect. We'll have to wait and see. And across town over at Twitter, the New York Times reports that Twitter has kind of stopped paying rent on its offices, you know the offices that Elon Musk has demanded that everyone who still works at Twitter returns to those offices, In fact, there are offices that, at least in the San Francisco branch, employees had set up beds so they could work increasingly long hours without actually leaving because Elon Musk is determined to be visited by three spirits in you know, nine days or so. Now, apparently employees have been instructed to not pay vendors, which you know, is another great sign of a company doing a okay. It's also a totally cool business practice to not pay the people who provided goods and services to you. It's not at all scummy. This also includes a nearly two hundred thousand dollar bill for private charter flights. At least according to a lawsuit, these would be flights that Twitter arranged when Musk was taking over the company and flying back and forth to visit various offices. There have allegedly been discussions at the executive level about what consequences the company might face if it were to you know, not pay severance on all those in employees who received a severance package upon being laid off from the company, The question being would it be cheaper to pay severance or just fight the lawsuits that would come in. Would we rather just fight lawsuits, which gross right, and if anyone in Twitter were to go blabbing to the press about stuff happening when the company, Musk says he would bring the wrath of the gods down on them, though not in so many words. He would just say, you sign a non disclosure agreement and we will take you to court and sue you to the fullest extent of the law. In fact, he might need six ghosts. Then there's the matter of Ahmad abu Amo. He's a former Twitter employee who is now facing three and a half years of prison. Why well, he was convicted earlier this year of spying on behalf of the Saudi Arabian government while he was working for Twitter, and he worked at Twitter from fifteen. During that time, he apparently used his access as a media partnerships manager to gather data about people who have been critical of the Saudi Arabian government. Then he sent that data too, said government. And just a reminder, this is the same government that allegedly ordered the murder of a journalist named Jamal ka Shogi. I say allegedly because until it's completely proven, I guess I need to. But everyone essentially agrees that Jamalka Shogi was assassinated on behalf of the Saudi Arabian government. This is also the government that has sentenced people to more than ten years in jail for criticizing the government on social media in the past. And it's also the same government that has a significant ownership stake in the current version of Twitter. In fact, there I believe the second largest stakeholder behind Elon Musk. Anyway, secutors showed how abu Omo received large payments from the Saudi government as well as the gift of a watch valued at more than forty grand which oh, come on. Anyway, he has already been convicted, as I said, and now he has been sentenced to three and a half years in prison on counts of acting as a foreign agent, acting in the in the context of a money launderer, uh falsification of records, and other charges as well. By the way, the fact that he's just looking at three and a half years is kind of why I said at the beginning of this episode that I don't think SPF is going to have that full hundred fifteen year sentence thrown at him if he should be convicted. And Kenya Amnesty International is backing a lawsuit against Meta that claims that the company allowed hate speech and calls for inciting violence to spread without moderation on Facebook and it exacerbated the war and Uh Tigrai, which is a northern province in Ethiopia. Now, the conflict in Ethiopia is a really complicated one. It involves a very long history of different ethnic groups and foreign uh countries within the country vying for power. Honestly, the country has been in conflict way more frequently than it has enjoyed peace in modern history. The recent conflicts have largely revolved around Ti Gray, which in recent Ethiopian history had been a dominant political power before the balance shifted to other groups within Ethiopia. In early November, these various parties involved in the war agreed to a ceasefire, but this lawsuit is arguing that Meata was complacent by allowing messages that encouraged violence and abuse throughout Ethiopia and made it harder for these opposing parties to arrive at any sort of ceasefire, and that as a result, many people suffered and died, some indirectly from the fact that this kind of language was spreading like wildfire on Facebook in Ethiopia, some directly that there have been arguments that some people were targeted as a result of hate speech that was spreading across Facebook. The lawsuits aim is to force Meta to create a compensation fund valued at around one point three billion dollars for the purposes of paying restitution to people who are victims of hate and violence on Facebook. Now, if you've listened to tech stuff long enough or paid attention to world news, you know that while Facebook has been in the spotlight for allowing harmful misinformation to spread here in the United States, it's way more of a problem in non English speaking countries. The company has fewer resources dedicated to preventing that kind of abuse on the platform. They have frankly not made it a priority to really tackle those problems in non English speaking countries, particularly in the developing world. So far, Facebook's response has been fairly boiler plate. The company has rules and policies about the types of stuff that's allowed on the platform, and it works hard to remove any material that violates those rules. So we'll have to keep an eye on this. See where this lawsuit develops from here. Wired reports that several Russian cities have experienced disruption in GPS signals over the last week. This sort of thing can sometimes be the result of attacks on infrastructure. I mean, it's possible to actually jam signals or to otherwise inhibit them, to spoof them so that you get incorrect information. But in this case, the Russian government may be the reason for the disruption itself. Ukraine forces have been relying on drones to strike important cities within Russia as Ukraine and Russia continue their war, and so it's possible that Russian authorities have ordered the disruption of GPS in an attempt to foil drone navigation systems and thus protect potential targets. According to analysts, the zones affected by GPS disruption measure hundreds or sometimes even thousands of kilometers in diameter around important cities. Now I imagine that it must be pretty challenging to navigate in those cities for a lot of folks right now. Just as a side note, this also demonstrates that there's real value in learning how to read a paper roadmap, and having a physical roadmap in your vehicle is a good idea, and over dependence on technology can become a problem if that technology should fail for whatever reasons. So just maybe one of your stocking stuffers this holiday season, or your Hanukkah gifts, or you know, just something you want to buy for yourself should be a roadmap and just familiarize yourself with it so that in case you should ever need it, you know how to read it. Okay, that's enough of that. We're gonna come back after this break and finish up with a few more news items. But first let's listen to these messages. We're back. Okay, I've got a positive story here. It's a short one. A couple of motorists are really thankful for the iPhone fourteen's satellite connectivity, which is available on the iPhone fourteen and the iPhone fourteen Pro. These two motorists were in a car accident. They were driving down a road in California through some canyons and cell services pretty hard to come by in this particular region of Los Angeles County, not the city of the county, and their vehicles slid off the road and it went down the side of a mountain. Fortunately, the two were able to get out of the car. They were able to connect the their iPhone fourteen to a satellite and they were able to contact emergency services. Emergency services, then we're able to use the location data to direct a rescue helicopter to their location where they were rescued and then taken to a hospital for observation. And I wanted to include the story because it has a happy ending and it shows how tech really can make a huge and positive difference. Like I know, in my news items, I frequently am focusing on some pretty dark stuff that involves tech. But you know, tech is a tool. It's just like Hamlet said, there's nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so. While tools neither good nor bad, it's just and how you use it, and you can use them in really good, positive ways. This is one of them. And uh, honestly, I'm very thankful that Apple included the satellite connectivity in the most recent iPhones because it means that people like this have another lifeline in situations where otherwise they might be completely helpless. In other Apple use the company is reportedly getting ready to allow third party app stores on iOS for the first time ever, so this would include stuff like Amazon's App Store, for example, which typically you would not be able to install on an iOS device or the Epic Game Store. Again, you wouldn't be able to do that. You would have to do everything through Apple itself. Now, the reason for this change is because not because Apple suddenly became really hospitable. It's because the EU passed the Digital Markets Act and it cracks down on policies that would otherwise give a platform and unfair advantage over would be competitors. So the Act makes it illegal for a company to become kind of a gatekeeper to its own ecosystem if that ecosystem is like a significantly large and important one like iOS. Now, whether this is ultimately going to lead to a catastrophic downturn for users safety, which Apple has repeatedly warned about, They've said that's the reason they have an allow it in the past. That remains to be seen. Now, I will say, while I'm skeptical that it's going to lead to the downfall of civilization, it is always a good idea to do research before you sideload anything onto a device. When you sidestep the official you know, app store, make sure that whatever it is you're about to download and install is on the up and up, because otherwise you can run into problems. A hacker claims to have used a bit of social engineering to get access to an important FBI database. The database is called infra Guard and it is essentially a collection of like eighty thousand people in various organizations, including government agencies as well as corporations, and these are people who are considered to be important when it comes to protecting US infrastructure. The hacker claims they got access to this by posing as the CEO of a company and said that they were actually surprised at how poor the vetting process was when they uh when they essentially applied to get access, and then we're granted access to this database. So this is kind of like a directory of really important people that are related to US infrastructure. The hacker has been on cybercriminal forums asking for fifty thousand bucks in return for this database. Now, the info in this database appears to be somewhat limited. Most entries consist of like a name and an email address and that's about it. But this could still serve as a valuable list for someone who wants to engage in spear fishing. This is a targeted version of fishing to get you know, sensitive information. It's an attempt to compromise someone and trick them into handing over access to more important systems bad form FBI, that's the oldest trick in the book. YouTube announced that soon bots will be able to remove comments deemed to be abusive, and will also be able to issue temporary bands for at least short while two users who are being jerks in the comments sections of the platform. So if you get multiple warnings from a bot that you know your comments are being removed because you're being um a jerk face, then the bot can ultimately give you a twenty four hour time out where you can't comment on anything in that twenty four hours. It does not sound like channel owners are going to have the option to opt out of this particular policy, that it's just kind of there by default, And as Ron Amadeo of artist Hetnica points out, this approach is probably the only one that YouTube can feasibly take. You have hundreds of hours of content that has uploaded to YouTube every single minute of the day, plus you have countless live streams active at any given time, so there's just no way that the company could dedicate a large enough staff of human content moderators to oversee everything, it would be impossible. So really the question is going to end up being is automated content moderation better than no content moderation? We'll have to find out. Executives at Google apparently discussed the phenomenon of chat GPT recently. That's an AI chat bot, and it's proven to be really compelling. I've talked about it previously on tech Stuff. The chat bought is capable of putting together responses to various queries in a way that seems authoritative and trustworthy. Now I say seems authoritative and trustworthy because folks have pointed out that at least in some cases, the responses generated can sometimes include questionable or outright wrong information, but the style of presentation seems reliable and structured, and that can give the reader the incorrect feeling that they can count on the information being given to them that it's a good answer, when in reality it may not be. As such, the Google executives said that while Google has similar capabilities with their AI chat bots, they are not putting them out there out of a concern that they pose a quote unquote reputational risk due to issues with factuality and bias, and as such, a model similar to chat GPT is not likely to replace our current method of search anytime soon. Now, over time, maybe we will see search gravitate toward a more semantic web kind of presentation in the future. That's where you would log into the web, you would ask whatever it was you wanted, and the web would quote unquote understand what you were asking based upon who you were, your your situation in life, you know, all these sort of factors that your browser can't do right now. But that's the concept of the semantic web, and a lot of people have been kind of comparing chat GPT with that idea. But chat GPT is is far more limited than the concept of semantic web would require. So uh, it's tough right now. Like it's really tough when you essentially have a black box that generates answers when you ask questions, but it doesn't tell you how it came to those answers. That means you probably shouldn't put all your eggs in that mysterious basket. Finally, a British man named Amar Reshi used AI to create a children's book, and now he says people have been sending him abusive and threatening messages, so Reshi used chat gpt to generate a story about a character named Alice and her friendly robots Sparkle as Alice tries to learn about technology. He had to refine the story. He had to come up this in different ways and ask different questions of chat gpt, but ultimately chat gpt generated the basic story. Now, to illustrate the story, he used an app called mid journey, and it makes images based off simple textual prompts. He said. Likewise, he had to refine his search results many, many, many times because mid Journey would often generate stuff that was, you know, not really fitting for a children's book, he said. In some cases, if he was writing a horror novel, it would have been the right way to go. But over time he was able to get those refined and then once he was happy with the results, he collected them and then published a children's book using Amazon's Kindled direct publishing tool. And his close friends all thought this was a super cute idea. Like he was doing it because you know, he wanted to give a gift to friends who had little kids. And then he shared it with a slightly larger group, and then he went on Twitter and talked about it, and that's when he started getting pushback. You had authors and illustrators who would criticize Reshi for outsourcing human creativity two machines, and they argued that his actions cheapen the artistry that goes into these pursuits. They're also worried that these systems which use machine learning are using their own works as source material in order to learn that these machines are going to, over time get better and better at copying specific styles. So you could say, like, I want a poem in the style of Dr SEUs about such and such, and ultimately you could get to a point where you would get a poem that seemed to have been written by Dr SEUs, but wasn't. That's something that people are really concerned about. Creatives are really concerned about that, and I don't blame them. I think that's a legitimate concern. They're also, you know, really worried that that you'll have entities out there that would usually do you know, work for higher kind of jobs, turned to AI and just be satisfied that it's quote unquote good enough that the work produced will not be great work not nearly as great as what a human would produce. But that the the people doing the hiring might not care because they're able to get that work for free as opposed to having to pay someone for it. Now. Reschi says he was surprised at receiving abuse and threats, but he does understand how artists and authors feel threatened and concerned, and he even went on to say that those concerns could be quite valid, that you know those are There's some questions that need to be answered, like how are these artists AI programs being trained? Are they being trained on copy written works, on things that are being developed by illustrators and artists today, and is it not fair? Like is it unfair for those artists to go uncompensated while meanwhile these AI programs are potentially copying their styles. These are tough questions, and honestly, I think it's great to start asking questions like this and to really dive down in to the ethics of how we use a I and UH. I think that these are conversations we have to really start jumping into. We thought we probably wouldn't need to worry about them for years. No, that time is now. We have to have these conversations about the ethics of AI now in order to kind of figure out best practices and ways that we're not harming people or exploiting them or stealing from them, like all these things are very important. So I think it's a fascinating story. I think it was a fascinating experiment. And if if Freshie had not, you know, published it more widely, if you had not publicized it more widely, I guess I should say probably nothing would have come of it. But because of that, it just created this storm of controversy and unfortunately, of threats. I think that anyone threatening somebody for doing something like this is definitively in the wrong. They should not do that. That is not the way to go ever, so shame on those folks, like they need to get some perspective here. But it does mean that we need to start having these conversations, uh, in order to come to a common understanding. Okay, that's it. That's it for the news for this week. I will be coming to you next week, hopefully with some episodes that will kind of wrap up some of the or maybe not wrap up, but at least touch on some of the big stories that unfolded in tech this year. So next week will probably be a lot of episodes about that instead of the normal tech news episodes. I think it'll probably just be a continuation of the big stories of two, just based upon the list of headlines I have written down. I haven't actually started writing it yet, so I suspect it's going to be a very long series of episodes. But a lot of stuff happened this year. If you have suggestions for things I should cover on tech Stuff, please reach out to me. A couple of ways to do that. One is to download the I Heart Radio app, which is free to downloads free to use. You can just navigate to tech Stuff through the little search field and there's a little microphone icon. If you click on that, you can leave a message up to thirty seconds in length. Let me know if you would like me to use it in a future episode. I will not use it unless you tell me too, but that's a one way to to suggest topics. Another is to use Twitter. The handle that we use is tech stuff hs W and I will talk to you again really soon, y. Tech 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,

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from my 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 Thursday, December twenty two. And you know, I do news episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and every time a Thursday rolls around, I worry that I'm not gonna have enough material to really do a decent episode. But that is definitely not a problem. Today we have a ton to talk about, including some updates on stories that we've chatted about in previous news episodes, including Tuesdays. So let's begin with f t X. Now, I'm not gonna do a full catch up on f t X because I actually did that on Tuesday's episode. So if you don't know what f t X is and you want to know, I recommend just listening to the first five minutes or so of Tuesday's show and then that'll get you up to speed. So first up is the matter of Sam Bankman Freed or SBF. He's a co founder of the cryptocurrency exchange f t X, so he was arrested on Monday evening, which I talked about on Tuesday's episode. But now we've learned that if he's convicted of the crimes he stands accused of, he could face a maximum of a hundred fifteen years in prison. He could spend the rest of his life in prison. He has eight federal counts against him. Those charges range from wire fraud to securities fraud to money laundering. Now, all that being said, I think it is highly unlikely he'll face anything close to a hundred fifteen years. Uh, He's still likely to end up with a prison sentence, perhaps a considerable one, like ten years or so. But one challenge for the prosecution is proving beyond a reasonable doubt that SPF was committing fraud. So here in the United States, we have a saying that goes ignorance of the law is no excuse. Now, generally, what that means is that if you unknowingly break a law, it still means you broke a law, and you can still be held accountable for it. Being ignorant of law does not excuse you from accountability. However, there are a few crimes that require things like intent and understanding to be considered a crime. So fraud is an example fraud, at least in some jurisdictions. Fraud is a crime that carries with it the concept of intent that you intended to defraud someone. If you did not intend to do it and it happened by accident, then it's not really fraud at least in those jurisdictions. It could still be some other crime, but it would not be fraud. There are other examples of crimes where intent makes a different. So that's what separates something like voluntary manslaughter from involuntary manslaughter. Is intent. Anyway, I think the odds are at least some charges will stick to SBF and he's going to be looking at a prison sentence of at least a few years, just I don't expect the hundred fifteen max to to fall on his shoulders. Meanwhile, f t X is in the process of going through bankruptcy, and really what they're going through is liquidating assets and trying to recapture as much value as they can to return to creditors and investors. So Tuesday I mentioned how the government of the Bahamas wanted to get involved in how certain f t X assets are being handled because f t X established headquarters in the Bahamas a while back, and SPF and one of his buddies bought thirty five properties around New Providence, Bahamas, and in total those properties value at around two fifty million dollars. You've got a couple of branches of f t X that are involved in this as well. There's f t X, the American company. There's f t X Digital Markets that's the Bahamanian branch of f t X. And what the American branch of f t X is essentially saying is we don't want to share any information with f t X Digital Markets because we don't trust the government of the Bahamas and we worry that the government will steal stuff that we're trying to liquidate, that they will lean on ft X Digital Markets and get that information, and then our investors will not get the value that they deserve. Meanwhile, ft X Digital is saying this is nonsense. We were appointed by a court order and our job is to liquidate assets to recover money for investors and creditors too. But we do that unless we actually have access to data. So our job is the same as your job is essentially what they're saying, then you have the government of the Bahamas and it's like, hey, it's against the law for matters involving Bahamanian land to be arbitrated outside of the Bahamas. So it's a big old mess. In other words, Ultimately, the only job FTX really has right now is to get as much value from whatever assets it has and to then hand that over to the creditors and the investors. So it's no surprise that we're seeing this kind of tug of war between the branches as well as the Bahamanian government. So yeah, everybody feels like they're owed a piece of this, and so there's gonna be probably some pretty nasty arguments about how it needs to be divvied up, because there are a lot of people who are holding the bag right now and they don't. They don't want to They don't want to be holding the bag. If anything, they want that bag to be very very small, if they have to hold a bag at all. So yeah, this isn't over with. Then. Over at Binance, which is the largest cryptocurrency exchange, it's also an entity that had let's say, a contentious relationship with f t X. The CEO of Binance is trying to calm matters. Internally, his name's Chong Peng Zoo. He's also known as c Z because we just love initialisms in crypto. And he sent a memo to employees and acknowledge that folks have recently withdrawn a lot of money from Finance, more than a billion dollars in one day. Some estimates say that in the week leading up to yesterday that customers have removed more than three and a half billion dollars from the exchange. But he says, you know, this happens like there are days where we might have a billion in deposits in other days where you might have a billion in withdrawals. It's not a cause for alarm. He did also warn that crypto in general is in for rough time, but quote, this organization was built to last. As long as we continue to offer users the best product, user experience, and frictionless trading environment, Finance will survive any crypto winter end. Quote Now, as I mentioned on Tuesday, Binance is also the subject of a US Department of Justice investigation. There are concerns that some of the shenanigans that we're going on at f t X are also happening over at Binance, including like ten billion dollars of illegal payments processing. While Binance did commission a report from a third party to be more transparent about the company's reserves, that report has not satisfied everyone out there, So this too, is a developing story. Another developing story revolves around the US government's stance on TikTok. So on Tuesday, I talked about how there are some proposals developing in Congress that would ban TikTok in the United States unless the company becomes a true the US based business, essentially cutting all ties to China because right now TikTok is a subsidiary of a Chinese company called byte Dance. Well, now the U s Senate has voted to ban federal employees from installing TikTok on government owned devices. Now, this is obviously not like a nationwide ban on TikTok for everybody. It's rather another display of how government officials are worried that TikTok the video platform could be used by the Chinese Communist Party as a way to gather information about people in the US, something that TikTok reps have denied repeatedly in the past. A few state governments have already passed similar laws for state government employees, so this federal vote will also have to pass the House of Representatives before it can then be sent to President Biden's office for his signature, which would be interesting to see because Biden and his administration have been an active negotiations with to Talk in an effort to find a way where TikTok can operate within the US without fear of it serving as spyware for China. Now, personally, I actually think it's okay to tell federal government employees, hey, if the phone belongs to the federal government, don't put TikTok on the phone. You can save TikTok for your own personal device. Now, maybe that's because I also think it would be weird for a lot of companies to say, oh, sure, go ahead and put TikTok on your corporate device. I think it's totally fair for a corporation and say, hey, you know, just don't You can do it for your own personal one, but for your work phone, don't put it on there. I think the same thing should be true for government employees. But then, as I have said many times, I am old and grouchy and I'm only getting more so with every passing day. Now. Speaking of TikTok, the Center for Countering Digital Hate released a report that claims TikTok's algorithm is regularly serving up harmful in the sial to young users. So researchers with the organization created accounts fake accounts on TikTok. So the accounts claimed to be representing a thirteen year old user. That's the minimum age that you can be on TikTok. They then chose mental health, embody image as areas of interest. With one of these accounts they used a female user name, and the other one they used the user name that had lose weight as part of the name, just to see if that would have any effect on the content they received. And according to the researchers, it took less than three minutes before they started to encounter content related to suicide and within eight minutes they started seeing content about eating disorders. And when I say content about, I mean content promoting these things, not content raising awareness about them. Are trying to counsel people or to prevent problems, but rather to incite them. So the researchers said it was clear that TikTok algorithm was amplifying these harmful messages and that the effect on young users could be really dangerous. It could contribute to mental health issues. Now, behind the scenes, what appears to be going on is that TikTok's algorithm selects from content that the algorithm estimates will be of interest to the user. When something is a hit, the algorithm looks for similar content, and by a hit, I mean did did a person watch the video all the way through? So as you spend more time paying attention to certain types of content, what the algorithm is doing is just trying to serve up similar content to you in the thought that this will keep you on TikTok longer. So at best you could say that the algorithm is ultimately content agnostic. It's not necessarily trying to harm anyone, but it's not trying to save anyone either. Instead, it's just trying to keep people on the app for as long as possible. And if terrible traumatic content is what's keeping someone on there, well it's just gonna keep on sending that content on. So if people are watching videos that contain harmful messages, they'll keep getting more of those. And again, the issue here is one of amplification. It's not so much that you're you know, shouldn't be allowed to say bad things, although you should always know that consequences can come from saying bad things, but that it's the artificial amplification of those messages and the potential harm that can cause two users. So it's similar to problems that we've seen on other platforms like Facebook, where recommendation algorithms have played a big part in, say, the proliferation of misinformation. I'm sure these kinds of studies will fuel more efforts on the regulatory and government side as well. A lot of that focus has been on the potential use of TikTok as spywear essentially, but some of it is also on a concern about how it could be affecting the mental health of users, particularly young users. There's a lot of armchair psychology too about whether or not TikTok is absolutely ruining attention spans and making it impossible for younger people to pay attention to anything that lasts longer than a few seconds. Uh. Again, I don't have any actual hard data on that. I don't know if that's really the case. If it is, I'm doomed because all these episodes are long. Alright, with that, we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, we've got some more news. Okay, we're back. So Tesla's stock price hit their lowest point in two years yesterday. Reuters sites investors who are concerned that CEO Elon Musk is spending too much of his time and energy over at Twitter, which you know, at least from the surface, appears to be a valid concern. According to filings with the U S Securities and Exchange Commission or the SEC, Elon Musk himself offloaded millions of his own personal shares of Tesla. Now, keep in mind, Musk is still the majority owner of Tesla. He still has the more most shares of anybody, So while he sold off millions, he's got millions more. But the value of the stocks he sold off, according to those filings, was three point five billion dollars yauza. Now, generally speaking, when a CEO sells off large chunks of their own shares of the company, they're they're headed um. Investors can get a little worried because sometimes they'll take it as a sign that the CEO foresees troubled waters ahead. And that the CEO has lost confidence in their own business. However, in this case, Musk's ongoing Twitter issues maybe playing a part in his decision to sell off stocks. But because Twitter has billions of dollars of debt and massive interest payments coming in off that debt, and the banks that helped Musk secure financing for his purchase of Twitter have reportedly been looking at margin loans on Musk's Tesla stock, and the declining price of the stock is likely not a welcome site to those banks. But with all that being said, I just checked the Tesla stock as I'm recording this episode, and it's currently trading at a hundred fifty seven dollars, so it's up slightly from its low of around a hundred fifty six dollars. So it could be that Musk's cashing out of those stocks won't have as big a ripple as some might suspect. We'll have to wait and see. And across town over at Twitter, the New York Times reports that Twitter has kind of stopped paying rent on its offices, you know the offices that Elon Musk has demanded that everyone who still works at Twitter returns to those offices, In fact, there are offices that, at least in the San Francisco branch, employees had set up beds so they could work increasingly long hours without actually leaving because Elon Musk is determined to be visited by three spirits in you know, nine days or so. Now, apparently employees have been instructed to not pay vendors, which you know, is another great sign of a company doing a okay. It's also a totally cool business practice to not pay the people who provided goods and services to you. It's not at all scummy. This also includes a nearly two hundred thousand dollar bill for private charter flights. At least according to a lawsuit, these would be flights that Twitter arranged when Musk was taking over the company and flying back and forth to visit various offices. There have allegedly been discussions at the executive level about what consequences the company might face if it were to you know, not pay severance on all those in employees who received a severance package upon being laid off from the company, The question being would it be cheaper to pay severance or just fight the lawsuits that would come in. Would we rather just fight lawsuits, which gross right, and if anyone in Twitter were to go blabbing to the press about stuff happening when the company, Musk says he would bring the wrath of the gods down on them, though not in so many words. He would just say, you sign a non disclosure agreement and we will take you to court and sue you to the fullest extent of the law. In fact, he might need six ghosts. Then there's the matter of Ahmad abu Amo. He's a former Twitter employee who is now facing three and a half years of prison. Why well, he was convicted earlier this year of spying on behalf of the Saudi Arabian government while he was working for Twitter, and he worked at Twitter from fifteen. During that time, he apparently used his access as a media partnerships manager to gather data about people who have been critical of the Saudi Arabian government. Then he sent that data too, said government. And just a reminder, this is the same government that allegedly ordered the murder of a journalist named Jamal ka Shogi. I say allegedly because until it's completely proven, I guess I need to. But everyone essentially agrees that Jamalka Shogi was assassinated on behalf of the Saudi Arabian government. This is also the government that has sentenced people to more than ten years in jail for criticizing the government on social media in the past. And it's also the same government that has a significant ownership stake in the current version of Twitter. In fact, there I believe the second largest stakeholder behind Elon Musk. Anyway, secutors showed how abu Omo received large payments from the Saudi government as well as the gift of a watch valued at more than forty grand which oh, come on. Anyway, he has already been convicted, as I said, and now he has been sentenced to three and a half years in prison on counts of acting as a foreign agent, acting in the in the context of a money launderer, uh falsification of records, and other charges as well. By the way, the fact that he's just looking at three and a half years is kind of why I said at the beginning of this episode that I don't think SPF is going to have that full hundred fifteen year sentence thrown at him if he should be convicted. And Kenya Amnesty International is backing a lawsuit against Meta that claims that the company allowed hate speech and calls for inciting violence to spread without moderation on Facebook and it exacerbated the war and Uh Tigrai, which is a northern province in Ethiopia. Now, the conflict in Ethiopia is a really complicated one. It involves a very long history of different ethnic groups and foreign uh countries within the country vying for power. Honestly, the country has been in conflict way more frequently than it has enjoyed peace in modern history. The recent conflicts have largely revolved around Ti Gray, which in recent Ethiopian history had been a dominant political power before the balance shifted to other groups within Ethiopia. In early November, these various parties involved in the war agreed to a ceasefire, but this lawsuit is arguing that Meata was complacent by allowing messages that encouraged violence and abuse throughout Ethiopia and made it harder for these opposing parties to arrive at any sort of ceasefire, and that as a result, many people suffered and died, some indirectly from the fact that this kind of language was spreading like wildfire on Facebook in Ethiopia, some directly that there have been arguments that some people were targeted as a result of hate speech that was spreading across Facebook. The lawsuits aim is to force Meta to create a compensation fund valued at around one point three billion dollars for the purposes of paying restitution to people who are victims of hate and violence on Facebook. Now, if you've listened to tech stuff long enough or paid attention to world news, you know that while Facebook has been in the spotlight for allowing harmful misinformation to spread here in the United States, it's way more of a problem in non English speaking countries. The company has fewer resources dedicated to preventing that kind of abuse on the platform. They have frankly not made it a priority to really tackle those problems in non English speaking countries, particularly in the developing world. So far, Facebook's response has been fairly boiler plate. The company has rules and policies about the types of stuff that's allowed on the platform, and it works hard to remove any material that violates those rules. So we'll have to keep an eye on this. See where this lawsuit develops from here. Wired reports that several Russian cities have experienced disruption in GPS signals over the last week. This sort of thing can sometimes be the result of attacks on infrastructure. I mean, it's possible to actually jam signals or to otherwise inhibit them, to spoof them so that you get incorrect information. But in this case, the Russian government may be the reason for the disruption itself. Ukraine forces have been relying on drones to strike important cities within Russia as Ukraine and Russia continue their war, and so it's possible that Russian authorities have ordered the disruption of GPS in an attempt to foil drone navigation systems and thus protect potential targets. According to analysts, the zones affected by GPS disruption measure hundreds or sometimes even thousands of kilometers in diameter around important cities. Now I imagine that it must be pretty challenging to navigate in those cities for a lot of folks right now. Just as a side note, this also demonstrates that there's real value in learning how to read a paper roadmap, and having a physical roadmap in your vehicle is a good idea, and over dependence on technology can become a problem if that technology should fail for whatever reasons. So just maybe one of your stocking stuffers this holiday season, or your Hanukkah gifts, or you know, just something you want to buy for yourself should be a roadmap and just familiarize yourself with it so that in case you should ever need it, you know how to read it. Okay, that's enough of that. We're gonna come back after this break and finish up with a few more news items. But first let's listen to these messages. We're back. Okay, I've got a positive story here. It's a short one. A couple of motorists are really thankful for the iPhone fourteen's satellite connectivity, which is available on the iPhone fourteen and the iPhone fourteen Pro. These two motorists were in a car accident. They were driving down a road in California through some canyons and cell services pretty hard to come by in this particular region of Los Angeles County, not the city of the county, and their vehicles slid off the road and it went down the side of a mountain. Fortunately, the two were able to get out of the car. They were able to connect the their iPhone fourteen to a satellite and they were able to contact emergency services. Emergency services, then we're able to use the location data to direct a rescue helicopter to their location where they were rescued and then taken to a hospital for observation. And I wanted to include the story because it has a happy ending and it shows how tech really can make a huge and positive difference. Like I know, in my news items, I frequently am focusing on some pretty dark stuff that involves tech. But you know, tech is a tool. It's just like Hamlet said, there's nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so. While tools neither good nor bad, it's just and how you use it, and you can use them in really good, positive ways. This is one of them. And uh, honestly, I'm very thankful that Apple included the satellite connectivity in the most recent iPhones because it means that people like this have another lifeline in situations where otherwise they might be completely helpless. In other Apple use the company is reportedly getting ready to allow third party app stores on iOS for the first time ever, so this would include stuff like Amazon's App Store, for example, which typically you would not be able to install on an iOS device or the Epic Game Store. Again, you wouldn't be able to do that. You would have to do everything through Apple itself. Now, the reason for this change is because not because Apple suddenly became really hospitable. It's because the EU passed the Digital Markets Act and it cracks down on policies that would otherwise give a platform and unfair advantage over would be competitors. So the Act makes it illegal for a company to become kind of a gatekeeper to its own ecosystem if that ecosystem is like a significantly large and important one like iOS. Now, whether this is ultimately going to lead to a catastrophic downturn for users safety, which Apple has repeatedly warned about, They've said that's the reason they have an allow it in the past. That remains to be seen. Now, I will say, while I'm skeptical that it's going to lead to the downfall of civilization, it is always a good idea to do research before you sideload anything onto a device. When you sidestep the official you know, app store, make sure that whatever it is you're about to download and install is on the up and up, because otherwise you can run into problems. A hacker claims to have used a bit of social engineering to get access to an important FBI database. The database is called infra Guard and it is essentially a collection of like eighty thousand people in various organizations, including government agencies as well as corporations, and these are people who are considered to be important when it comes to protecting US infrastructure. The hacker claims they got access to this by posing as the CEO of a company and said that they were actually surprised at how poor the vetting process was when they uh when they essentially applied to get access, and then we're granted access to this database. So this is kind of like a directory of really important people that are related to US infrastructure. The hacker has been on cybercriminal forums asking for fifty thousand bucks in return for this database. Now, the info in this database appears to be somewhat limited. Most entries consist of like a name and an email address and that's about it. But this could still serve as a valuable list for someone who wants to engage in spear fishing. This is a targeted version of fishing to get you know, sensitive information. It's an attempt to compromise someone and trick them into handing over access to more important systems bad form FBI, that's the oldest trick in the book. YouTube announced that soon bots will be able to remove comments deemed to be abusive, and will also be able to issue temporary bands for at least short while two users who are being jerks in the comments sections of the platform. So if you get multiple warnings from a bot that you know your comments are being removed because you're being um a jerk face, then the bot can ultimately give you a twenty four hour time out where you can't comment on anything in that twenty four hours. It does not sound like channel owners are going to have the option to opt out of this particular policy, that it's just kind of there by default, And as Ron Amadeo of artist Hetnica points out, this approach is probably the only one that YouTube can feasibly take. You have hundreds of hours of content that has uploaded to YouTube every single minute of the day, plus you have countless live streams active at any given time, so there's just no way that the company could dedicate a large enough staff of human content moderators to oversee everything, it would be impossible. So really the question is going to end up being is automated content moderation better than no content moderation? We'll have to find out. Executives at Google apparently discussed the phenomenon of chat GPT recently. That's an AI chat bot, and it's proven to be really compelling. I've talked about it previously on tech Stuff. The chat bought is capable of putting together responses to various queries in a way that seems authoritative and trustworthy. Now I say seems authoritative and trustworthy because folks have pointed out that at least in some cases, the responses generated can sometimes include questionable or outright wrong information, but the style of presentation seems reliable and structured, and that can give the reader the incorrect feeling that they can count on the information being given to them that it's a good answer, when in reality it may not be. As such, the Google executives said that while Google has similar capabilities with their AI chat bots, they are not putting them out there out of a concern that they pose a quote unquote reputational risk due to issues with factuality and bias, and as such, a model similar to chat GPT is not likely to replace our current method of search anytime soon. Now, over time, maybe we will see search gravitate toward a more semantic web kind of presentation in the future. That's where you would log into the web, you would ask whatever it was you wanted, and the web would quote unquote understand what you were asking based upon who you were, your your situation in life, you know, all these sort of factors that your browser can't do right now. But that's the concept of the semantic web, and a lot of people have been kind of comparing chat GPT with that idea. But chat GPT is is far more limited than the concept of semantic web would require. So uh, it's tough right now. Like it's really tough when you essentially have a black box that generates answers when you ask questions, but it doesn't tell you how it came to those answers. That means you probably shouldn't put all your eggs in that mysterious basket. Finally, a British man named Amar Reshi used AI to create a children's book, and now he says people have been sending him abusive and threatening messages, so Reshi used chat gpt to generate a story about a character named Alice and her friendly robots Sparkle as Alice tries to learn about technology. He had to refine the story. He had to come up this in different ways and ask different questions of chat gpt, but ultimately chat gpt generated the basic story. Now, to illustrate the story, he used an app called mid journey, and it makes images based off simple textual prompts. He said. Likewise, he had to refine his search results many, many, many times because mid Journey would often generate stuff that was, you know, not really fitting for a children's book, he said. In some cases, if he was writing a horror novel, it would have been the right way to go. But over time he was able to get those refined and then once he was happy with the results, he collected them and then published a children's book using Amazon's Kindled direct publishing tool. And his close friends all thought this was a super cute idea. Like he was doing it because you know, he wanted to give a gift to friends who had little kids. And then he shared it with a slightly larger group, and then he went on Twitter and talked about it, and that's when he started getting pushback. You had authors and illustrators who would criticize Reshi for outsourcing human creativity two machines, and they argued that his actions cheapen the artistry that goes into these pursuits. They're also worried that these systems which use machine learning are using their own works as source material in order to learn that these machines are going to, over time get better and better at copying specific styles. So you could say, like, I want a poem in the style of Dr SEUs about such and such, and ultimately you could get to a point where you would get a poem that seemed to have been written by Dr SEUs, but wasn't. That's something that people are really concerned about. Creatives are really concerned about that, and I don't blame them. I think that's a legitimate concern. They're also, you know, really worried that that you'll have entities out there that would usually do you know, work for higher kind of jobs, turned to AI and just be satisfied that it's quote unquote good enough that the work produced will not be great work not nearly as great as what a human would produce. But that the the people doing the hiring might not care because they're able to get that work for free as opposed to having to pay someone for it. Now. Reschi says he was surprised at receiving abuse and threats, but he does understand how artists and authors feel threatened and concerned, and he even went on to say that those concerns could be quite valid, that you know those are There's some questions that need to be answered, like how are these artists AI programs being trained? Are they being trained on copy written works, on things that are being developed by illustrators and artists today, and is it not fair? Like is it unfair for those artists to go uncompensated while meanwhile these AI programs are potentially copying their styles. These are tough questions, and honestly, I think it's great to start asking questions like this and to really dive down in to the ethics of how we use a I and UH. I think that these are conversations we have to really start jumping into. We thought we probably wouldn't need to worry about them for years. No, that time is now. We have to have these conversations about the ethics of AI now in order to kind of figure out best practices and ways that we're not harming people or exploiting them or stealing from them, like all these things are very important. So I think it's a fascinating story. I think it was a fascinating experiment. And if if Freshie had not, you know, published it more widely, if you had not publicized it more widely, I guess I should say probably nothing would have come of it. But because of that, it just created this storm of controversy and unfortunately, of threats. I think that anyone threatening somebody for doing something like this is definitively in the wrong. They should not do that. That is not the way to go ever, so shame on those folks, like they need to get some perspective here. But it does mean that we need to start having these conversations, uh, in order to come to a common understanding. Okay, that's it. That's it for the news for this week. I will be coming to you next week, hopefully with some episodes that will kind of wrap up some of the or maybe not wrap up, but at least touch on some of the big stories that unfolded in tech this year. So next week will probably be a lot of episodes about that instead of the normal tech news episodes. I think it'll probably just be a continuation of the big stories of two, just based upon the list of headlines I have written down. I haven't actually started writing it yet, so I suspect it's going to be a very long series of episodes. But a lot of stuff happened this year. If you have suggestions for things I should cover on tech Stuff, please reach out to me. A couple of ways to do that. One is to download the I Heart Radio app, which is free to downloads free to use. You can just navigate to tech Stuff through the little search field and there's a little microphone icon. If you click on that, you can leave a message up to thirty seconds in length. Let me know if you would like me to use it in a future episode. I will not use it unless you tell me too, but that's a one way to to suggest topics. Another is to use Twitter. The handle that we use is tech stuff hs W and I will talk to you again really soon, y. Tech 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,