Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and a love of all things tech. It is time for the tech News for Thursday, December twenty one, And before I start this episode, I want to give some trigger warnings. A few of the news stories I'll be covering today center around stuff like sexual harassment and abuse, and these are important stories, but obviously they're also really upsetting. I mean, I was upset by them, and I'm pretty sure that will come through while I talk about them in this episode, but I wanted to let all of you know about that before we get there. The first couple of stories do not cover that, but I didn't want it to come out of the blue and surprise you. But before any of that, you might remember that earlier this year, Apple CEO Tim Cook was pushing to get Apple corporate employees back into the office, citing a need for the energy that comes with getting a bunch of people together in the same space at the same time. Also, I'm guessing probably trying to justify that incredibly expensive and expansive Apple HQ that they built not too long ago, Like that thing came together just as the pandemic was starting, and so Apple has not had a chance to get as much use out of that as I'm sure they had anticipated. But you know, and there is something to be said about in person collaboration. There is value to being in the same space with people in order to collaborate and innovate. However, there's also something to be said for how having a bunch of people who are together in the same place at the same time can create an ideal environment for COVID to spread. Now Cook, the CEO, he evently acknowledged this issue, particularly when the delta variant first emerged and became very concerning a few months ago, and so he pushed back Apple's returned to office. In fact, that got pushed back a few times right we we had it established and then pushed back, and most recently the return date was listed as February one of However, yesterday Cook sentella memo saying that the return to the office has been pushed back and there is no yet return date that's yet to be determined, So it's indefinite, but not indefinite necessarily in the sense of, you know, perpetual, but rather we just don't want to give a date yet. Uh. With the omicron variant currently spreading like crazy, this is not a surprise. Cook also announced that every Apple employee, not just the corporate ones but ret l as well, will receive a one thousand dollar bonus that can be used for work from home needs. Uh. This isn't just the right thing to do for employees. It is, but it's not just that. It's also a really good pr move considering how Apple is currently in the news regarding the Apple two movement and lawsuits alleging that the company established and facilitated a toxic work environment and, according to one former employee, engaged in retaliatory behavior after she brought her concerns forward with management. So I guess what I'm saying is that this was the right call, but it does not get the company off the hook for those other, you know, alleged transgressions. Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of Intel, says he anticipates the global chip shortage will stretch at least as far as twenty twenty three. The demand for chips is still very high and the supply side just simply can't keep up. That comes not just from the manufacturing facilities that are hit by issues related to COVID or the finishing facilities in places like China which are also hit by COVID. It's really the entire supply chain. Shipping has taken a huge hit over the pandemic, with ports getting backed up and personnel stretched to the limit, like in order to catch up, we have these other bottlenecks, right, So that is the problem is that even if you solve one part of the issue, there's still the other parts that are affected and you have to figure out how to work around those. So while companies are rushing to boost their production operations, there are other challenges that we have to solve before chips can make it from the factory to a final product, whether that product is a computer or a video game or the video game console, or a smartphone, or or a car or whatever it might be. So we should expect to see this have a ripple effect through the rest of the tech industry to continue to do so. Really, because we've already seen this, Uh that is probably gonna make it a rough year for a lot of companies and of course millions of people. Whether they're employees of those companies, or they're dependent upon those products. It's gonna be tough. Of course, this is also assuming that, you know, his expectations become reality. Now I have no reason to doubt his prediction. In fact, I worry that we're gonna see this issue extend beyond twenty twenty three unless we come up with some really creative solutions to those bottleneck issues. That I was kind of alluding to. Another piece of Intel News ties into a topic that has been picking up momentum this year, that of the metaverse. Now once again, the metaverse is this vague notion of a digital world. It might be one that could overlay or otherwise interface with our real world, where people will be able to engage in activities that normally we would associate with, you know, an actual physical space. So that could include everything from at ending a concert virtually to meeting in a conference room with a bunch of other people's avatars, to touring a foreign city or perhaps touring a fictional city in a virtual environment. There's no single implementation of the metaverse as of yet. It's just kind of this notion of the future of computing and an online interaction. In some ideations, it's a virtual world that people visit using some sort of tech like a computer or a smartphone, or most often a VR setup of some kind. In other ideations, it involves not virtual reality, but a R or augmented reality, in which we see a digital overlay on top of the world around us that enhances our experience in some way, or at least it's meant to enhance our experience anyway. It's hard to talk about the metaverse in firm terms because we don't really have it yet. However, intels Rajah Kaduri, who is a senior VP of the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group, posted an editorial suggesting that any realization of an actual metaverse will require a whole lot more than what we have at our disposal right now. I'm reminded of that classic sequence from the acclaimed film Back to the Future Too, in which we hear Rafe data Anger say to Marty McFly, those boards don't work on water, and then Jester Whitey Nogura says, unless you got power. Well, it's it's the power that we need for the metaverse to work. According to Kunduri, he estimates that a metaverse as we generally imagine it to be would require us to have capabilities that are around a thousand times more powerful than what we have at our our disposal today. And that's not just computing power, it's also storage and networking infrastructure and things like that in order to support a full metaverse. As Chaim Gardenberg of The Verge points out, that seems to track because Gartenberg mentions that Horizon Worlds, which Facebook's um no, I'm sorry Meta, because that's the new company name. Meta's VR environment is called Horizon Worlds, and it can only hold at max twenty people in a virtual environment for a pretty rudimentary interactive experience. And I mean in a pandemic world, being around twenty people might feel like a lot. But that is not a full metaverse, not by a long stretch. So I think Duris post is a great example of critical thinking. It's an illustration that just because we seem to have some pieces of the metaverse puzzle in a pretty good place, it doesn't mean that all of the pieces are in that same place, and we won't be able to complete the picture until they're all ready to go. And that might be a while. I guess you could argue that it's good for companies like Meta Slash Facebook to get ahead of all that, But then I'm still skeptical that the metaverse will ever be more than a curiosity for the small percentage of people who can both afford the equipment to participate in it and who have the interest to actually do it. The rest of us, I don't know. I'm not sure we're going to go all ready Player one or snow crash or anything like that in the near future. All Right, well, we're gonna have a whole bunch more stories after we take this break, and that's when we're gonna get into the trigger warning section. But before we get to that, let's hear these messages. Okay, So, just before the break, I was talking about the metaverse and meta and while we're on that subject, I want to talk about an article written by Tanya Bessu and published in the M I T Technology Review. It as the title, the metaverse has a groping problem. Already that's simultaneously a sad thing to see, and arguably this makes it even more sad. It's not at all surprising now for all the women who are listening to this podcast, I'm gonna say some stuff that's so obvious that I'm sure you could just skip ahead because you all know this, you experience it. But for everyone else who is unaware, Women have been disproportionately targeted with abuse since okay, well, if we're talking big picture, pretty much ever. But it's definitely been that way online since the beginning of online interactions, whether it's harassment on Twitter or something like a group of abusers who are trying to docks women or something in between. Women face this kind of of abuse pretty much every day that they're online. To some extent. Now, honestly, I don't know how they manage, but anyway. Bassu writes that on November twenty six, one beta tester reported that she had been groped virtually and Meta's Horizon Worlds, and she also says that Meta's internal review found quote that the beta tester should have used a tool called safe zone end quote and saves own is quote a protective bubble that users can activate when feeling threatened end quote. Now, assuming this is not a mischaracterization of what that internal review specifically said, I just want to say that is really gross. Meta. I mean, really gross, because to me, that sounds like the internal review is saying, oh, hey, you got groped, Well, that's your fault because you should have activated this feature. And that's not how it is, y'all. Is the it's not the user's fault. It's the fault of the person who did the groping. Right, they're the ones who violated someone else. It's not the fault of the person who didn't activate a feature they may or may not have known about. It's the fault of the person who actually did the terrible thing. So again, assuming that Bessue wasn't misrepresenting the internal report, uh, and I have no reason to believe that she would. I just want to say, shame on you, Meta for making such a truly stupid and ugly statement. You can do better than that, at least I hope you can. Anyway. Nasu goes on to assert that until companies that are building out VR environments can find ways to protect people within those environments, the metaverse will never be a safe place. I imagine it would be a very unwelcome place for women, in particular, unless those women for some reason want to be harassed and hounded. The entire time they're on and news flash, they don't. Maybe it's a maybe it's dangerous to pay them all with a blanket statement like that, or to mix metaphors, but I feel pretty good about it. So if you've ever played in any like online game and a player revealed that they happen to be female, you've likely experienced at least one person being a total jackass about that. Now, I can only imagine that gets way worse in virtual environments where you have avatars and stuff. And before anyone reaches out to me and say, hey, chill out, it's not real, I just wanna say to you, sit down and shut up, because anyone who has even done the tiniest bit of research into virtual reality can tell you that the immersion of that experience is convincing enough to get our brains and bodies to behave as if it were a real experience. There are doctors who use virtual reality to treat people who have phobias because of virtual representation of a phobia can be an effective form of exposure therapy for patients. So if v are conserved as an effective psychological treatment, it stands to reason it can also contribute to legit psychological trauma. Anyway, to all my listeners out there, be good people, whether it's in the real world or a virtual one. And to all the companies out there working on metaverse solutions for goodness sake, operate under the assumption that you're gonna have some awful people log into your systems and create ways to protect the rest of us from those jerks. Staying on the topic of abuse, and to be clear, I would much rather cover happier tech news, but here's what I have. Let's talk about Tesla. Last month, Tesla employee Jessica Barrazza filed a lawsuit against the company, claiming that she and other women at the Fremont Tesla factory had experienced quote nightmarish conditions of rampant sexual harassment end quote, including being physically assaulted, and that Barazza had issued formal complaints and yet received no protection from the company, meaning Tesla was essentially complicit. And now six more women have sued Tesla with similar allegations. Those allegations definitely make the manufacturing facility sound like an absolutely horrifying place for women. David Lowe, who is serving as the attorney for these employees, says that Tesla's corporate culture shouldn't be a surprise because of how Elon Musk, the company's CEO, has engaged in misogynistic conduct and language. Low wrote in a press release that quote Elon Musk tweeting allude comment about women's bodies or a taunt toward employees who report misconduct reflects an attitude at the top that enables the pattern of pervasive sexual harassment and retaliation at the heart of these cases. End quote. Now you might also remember that SpaceX, another Musk enterprise, faces similar allegations from a former employee, an engineer, who says that the company is hostile toward women employees. So I recommend reading up on these stories because they include testimonies from the women involved, and their stories are heartbreaking, but I think are really important for people to know. Okay, we will now switch gears away from that really awful but important news. The Foreign motor company announced a project called ford Pro Charging that will help support a fleet of commercial electric vehicles. The commercial evs will include software that provides telematics two companies so that they can keep track of where their vehicles are uh the charging status, so they'll know how charge the batteries are at any given time, and also maintenance indicators. So the idea is that the system will empower companies to operate electric vehicles effectively, which is a good move considering the general trend towards migrating to e vs in favor of those rather than internal combustion engine vehicles, and having the ability to track individual vehicle performance as well as overall fleet performance is likely to create opportunities for innovation. For example, tracking charging trends can help a company come up with strategies that save in charging costs, which affects the bottom line, or tracking maintenance trends might alert a company if a particular type of electric vehicle is more or less reliable than other ones just based on the trends. These are things that ultimately down the line over time, can save an enormous amount of money. So pretty cool news in that regard. Yesterday, read It announced it was making a move toward taking the company public, filing an S one with the United States Security and Exchange Commission, or SEC. So this is when a private company moves to become a publicly traded company on the stock market. It's just one step of many that a company has to go through. It's not exactly an unexpected move. A lot of people have been predicting this, but I'm sure it is sending shock waves through Reddit itself because I'm guessing there are redditors who are worrying that a publicly traded version of Reddit will mean a more lockdown regulated Reddit. I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing, at least in many cases, because Reddit can also become a pretty brutal and abusive place. Um. But in other cases you might say, well, this is potentially a restriction on users being able to speak freely, which you know that that has its own problems too, So I get it. But considering some of the conversations I've seen on Reddit and their tone and the language used, Uh, it's an uphill battle. I think for some of those users to argue that it's a bad thing, but I get it, and we don't even know yet, right, it's just a general fear. I think Roku received some very bad news in the United States. The US International Trade Commission or i t C has ruled against Roku in a patent infringement case. A company called Universal Electronics Incorporated brought the case against Roku, saying that the company was infringing on I think six different patents, and the I t C agreed with u EI. That's the Universal Electronics Incorporated. And now I t C has barred the importation and sale of those Roku products. That band will take effect on January nine, twenty two, at which point merchants in the US will no longer be allowed to import and sell those Roku devices to American citizens, and Roku's stock price dropped twelve percent following the news. Finally, the streaming video game market is getting a bit more crowded. Twitch is the dominant player in that space, with YouTube and Facebook also vying to carve out massive slices of the market. But now TikTok is waiting into the field, launching a desktop streaming platform called TikTok Live Studio. It allows users to stream out video gameplay and other desktop applications across TikTok, though for the moment, it appears to be in a limited rollout for testing and it's not always accessible on TikTok itself. Not sure if this will graduate to a full feature for all TikTok users, but I could see the company wanting to tap into its young user base to pull some focus away from Twitch in particular, and that's it. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me. The handle for the show is tech Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. 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 I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and a love of all things tech. It is time for the tech News for Thursday, December twenty one, And before I start this episode, I want to give some trigger warnings. A few of the news stories I'll be covering today center around stuff like sexual harassment and abuse, and these are important stories, but obviously they're also really upsetting. I mean, I was upset by them, and I'm pretty sure that will come through while I talk about them in this episode, but I wanted to let all of you know about that before we get there. The first couple of stories do not cover that, but I didn't want it to come out of the blue and surprise you. But before any of that, you might remember that earlier this year, Apple CEO Tim Cook was pushing to get Apple corporate employees back into the office, citing a need for the energy that comes with getting a bunch of people together in the same space at the same time. Also, I'm guessing probably trying to justify that incredibly expensive and expansive Apple HQ that they built not too long ago, Like that thing came together just as the pandemic was starting, and so Apple has not had a chance to get as much use out of that as I'm sure they had anticipated. But you know, and there is something to be said about in person collaboration. There is value to being in the same space with people in order to collaborate and innovate. However, there's also something to be said for how having a bunch of people who are together in the same place at the same time can create an ideal environment for COVID to spread. Now Cook, the CEO, he evently acknowledged this issue, particularly when the delta variant first emerged and became very concerning a few months ago, and so he pushed back Apple's returned to office. In fact, that got pushed back a few times right we we had it established and then pushed back, and most recently the return date was listed as February one of However, yesterday Cook sentella memo saying that the return to the office has been pushed back and there is no yet return date that's yet to be determined, So it's indefinite, but not indefinite necessarily in the sense of, you know, perpetual, but rather we just don't want to give a date yet. Uh. With the omicron variant currently spreading like crazy, this is not a surprise. Cook also announced that every Apple employee, not just the corporate ones but ret l as well, will receive a one thousand dollar bonus that can be used for work from home needs. Uh. This isn't just the right thing to do for employees. It is, but it's not just that. It's also a really good pr move considering how Apple is currently in the news regarding the Apple two movement and lawsuits alleging that the company established and facilitated a toxic work environment and, according to one former employee, engaged in retaliatory behavior after she brought her concerns forward with management. So I guess what I'm saying is that this was the right call, but it does not get the company off the hook for those other, you know, alleged transgressions. Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of Intel, says he anticipates the global chip shortage will stretch at least as far as twenty twenty three. The demand for chips is still very high and the supply side just simply can't keep up. That comes not just from the manufacturing facilities that are hit by issues related to COVID or the finishing facilities in places like China which are also hit by COVID. It's really the entire supply chain. Shipping has taken a huge hit over the pandemic, with ports getting backed up and personnel stretched to the limit, like in order to catch up, we have these other bottlenecks, right, So that is the problem is that even if you solve one part of the issue, there's still the other parts that are affected and you have to figure out how to work around those. So while companies are rushing to boost their production operations, there are other challenges that we have to solve before chips can make it from the factory to a final product, whether that product is a computer or a video game or the video game console, or a smartphone, or or a car or whatever it might be. So we should expect to see this have a ripple effect through the rest of the tech industry to continue to do so. Really, because we've already seen this, Uh that is probably gonna make it a rough year for a lot of companies and of course millions of people. Whether they're employees of those companies, or they're dependent upon those products. It's gonna be tough. Of course, this is also assuming that, you know, his expectations become reality. Now I have no reason to doubt his prediction. In fact, I worry that we're gonna see this issue extend beyond twenty twenty three unless we come up with some really creative solutions to those bottleneck issues. That I was kind of alluding to. Another piece of Intel News ties into a topic that has been picking up momentum this year, that of the metaverse. Now once again, the metaverse is this vague notion of a digital world. It might be one that could overlay or otherwise interface with our real world, where people will be able to engage in activities that normally we would associate with, you know, an actual physical space. So that could include everything from at ending a concert virtually to meeting in a conference room with a bunch of other people's avatars, to touring a foreign city or perhaps touring a fictional city in a virtual environment. There's no single implementation of the metaverse as of yet. It's just kind of this notion of the future of computing and an online interaction. In some ideations, it's a virtual world that people visit using some sort of tech like a computer or a smartphone, or most often a VR setup of some kind. In other ideations, it involves not virtual reality, but a R or augmented reality, in which we see a digital overlay on top of the world around us that enhances our experience in some way, or at least it's meant to enhance our experience anyway. It's hard to talk about the metaverse in firm terms because we don't really have it yet. However, intels Rajah Kaduri, who is a senior VP of the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group, posted an editorial suggesting that any realization of an actual metaverse will require a whole lot more than what we have at our disposal right now. I'm reminded of that classic sequence from the acclaimed film Back to the Future Too, in which we hear Rafe data Anger say to Marty McFly, those boards don't work on water, and then Jester Whitey Nogura says, unless you got power. Well, it's it's the power that we need for the metaverse to work. According to Kunduri, he estimates that a metaverse as we generally imagine it to be would require us to have capabilities that are around a thousand times more powerful than what we have at our our disposal today. And that's not just computing power, it's also storage and networking infrastructure and things like that in order to support a full metaverse. As Chaim Gardenberg of The Verge points out, that seems to track because Gartenberg mentions that Horizon Worlds, which Facebook's um no, I'm sorry Meta, because that's the new company name. Meta's VR environment is called Horizon Worlds, and it can only hold at max twenty people in a virtual environment for a pretty rudimentary interactive experience. And I mean in a pandemic world, being around twenty people might feel like a lot. But that is not a full metaverse, not by a long stretch. So I think Duris post is a great example of critical thinking. It's an illustration that just because we seem to have some pieces of the metaverse puzzle in a pretty good place, it doesn't mean that all of the pieces are in that same place, and we won't be able to complete the picture until they're all ready to go. And that might be a while. I guess you could argue that it's good for companies like Meta Slash Facebook to get ahead of all that, But then I'm still skeptical that the metaverse will ever be more than a curiosity for the small percentage of people who can both afford the equipment to participate in it and who have the interest to actually do it. The rest of us, I don't know. I'm not sure we're going to go all ready Player one or snow crash or anything like that in the near future. All Right, well, we're gonna have a whole bunch more stories after we take this break, and that's when we're gonna get into the trigger warning section. But before we get to that, let's hear these messages. Okay, So, just before the break, I was talking about the metaverse and meta and while we're on that subject, I want to talk about an article written by Tanya Bessu and published in the M I T Technology Review. It as the title, the metaverse has a groping problem. Already that's simultaneously a sad thing to see, and arguably this makes it even more sad. It's not at all surprising now for all the women who are listening to this podcast, I'm gonna say some stuff that's so obvious that I'm sure you could just skip ahead because you all know this, you experience it. But for everyone else who is unaware, Women have been disproportionately targeted with abuse since okay, well, if we're talking big picture, pretty much ever. But it's definitely been that way online since the beginning of online interactions, whether it's harassment on Twitter or something like a group of abusers who are trying to docks women or something in between. Women face this kind of of abuse pretty much every day that they're online. To some extent. Now, honestly, I don't know how they manage, but anyway. Bassu writes that on November twenty six, one beta tester reported that she had been groped virtually and Meta's Horizon Worlds, and she also says that Meta's internal review found quote that the beta tester should have used a tool called safe zone end quote and saves own is quote a protective bubble that users can activate when feeling threatened end quote. Now, assuming this is not a mischaracterization of what that internal review specifically said, I just want to say that is really gross. Meta. I mean, really gross, because to me, that sounds like the internal review is saying, oh, hey, you got groped, Well, that's your fault because you should have activated this feature. And that's not how it is, y'all. Is the it's not the user's fault. It's the fault of the person who did the groping. Right, they're the ones who violated someone else. It's not the fault of the person who didn't activate a feature they may or may not have known about. It's the fault of the person who actually did the terrible thing. So again, assuming that Bessue wasn't misrepresenting the internal report, uh, and I have no reason to believe that she would. I just want to say, shame on you, Meta for making such a truly stupid and ugly statement. You can do better than that, at least I hope you can. Anyway. Nasu goes on to assert that until companies that are building out VR environments can find ways to protect people within those environments, the metaverse will never be a safe place. I imagine it would be a very unwelcome place for women, in particular, unless those women for some reason want to be harassed and hounded. The entire time they're on and news flash, they don't. Maybe it's a maybe it's dangerous to pay them all with a blanket statement like that, or to mix metaphors, but I feel pretty good about it. So if you've ever played in any like online game and a player revealed that they happen to be female, you've likely experienced at least one person being a total jackass about that. Now, I can only imagine that gets way worse in virtual environments where you have avatars and stuff. And before anyone reaches out to me and say, hey, chill out, it's not real, I just wanna say to you, sit down and shut up, because anyone who has even done the tiniest bit of research into virtual reality can tell you that the immersion of that experience is convincing enough to get our brains and bodies to behave as if it were a real experience. There are doctors who use virtual reality to treat people who have phobias because of virtual representation of a phobia can be an effective form of exposure therapy for patients. So if v are conserved as an effective psychological treatment, it stands to reason it can also contribute to legit psychological trauma. Anyway, to all my listeners out there, be good people, whether it's in the real world or a virtual one. And to all the companies out there working on metaverse solutions for goodness sake, operate under the assumption that you're gonna have some awful people log into your systems and create ways to protect the rest of us from those jerks. Staying on the topic of abuse, and to be clear, I would much rather cover happier tech news, but here's what I have. Let's talk about Tesla. Last month, Tesla employee Jessica Barrazza filed a lawsuit against the company, claiming that she and other women at the Fremont Tesla factory had experienced quote nightmarish conditions of rampant sexual harassment end quote, including being physically assaulted, and that Barazza had issued formal complaints and yet received no protection from the company, meaning Tesla was essentially complicit. And now six more women have sued Tesla with similar allegations. Those allegations definitely make the manufacturing facility sound like an absolutely horrifying place for women. David Lowe, who is serving as the attorney for these employees, says that Tesla's corporate culture shouldn't be a surprise because of how Elon Musk, the company's CEO, has engaged in misogynistic conduct and language. Low wrote in a press release that quote Elon Musk tweeting allude comment about women's bodies or a taunt toward employees who report misconduct reflects an attitude at the top that enables the pattern of pervasive sexual harassment and retaliation at the heart of these cases. End quote. Now you might also remember that SpaceX, another Musk enterprise, faces similar allegations from a former employee, an engineer, who says that the company is hostile toward women employees. So I recommend reading up on these stories because they include testimonies from the women involved, and their stories are heartbreaking, but I think are really important for people to know. Okay, we will now switch gears away from that really awful but important news. The Foreign motor company announced a project called ford Pro Charging that will help support a fleet of commercial electric vehicles. The commercial evs will include software that provides telematics two companies so that they can keep track of where their vehicles are uh the charging status, so they'll know how charge the batteries are at any given time, and also maintenance indicators. So the idea is that the system will empower companies to operate electric vehicles effectively, which is a good move considering the general trend towards migrating to e vs in favor of those rather than internal combustion engine vehicles, and having the ability to track individual vehicle performance as well as overall fleet performance is likely to create opportunities for innovation. For example, tracking charging trends can help a company come up with strategies that save in charging costs, which affects the bottom line, or tracking maintenance trends might alert a company if a particular type of electric vehicle is more or less reliable than other ones just based on the trends. These are things that ultimately down the line over time, can save an enormous amount of money. So pretty cool news in that regard. Yesterday, read It announced it was making a move toward taking the company public, filing an S one with the United States Security and Exchange Commission, or SEC. So this is when a private company moves to become a publicly traded company on the stock market. It's just one step of many that a company has to go through. It's not exactly an unexpected move. A lot of people have been predicting this, but I'm sure it is sending shock waves through Reddit itself because I'm guessing there are redditors who are worrying that a publicly traded version of Reddit will mean a more lockdown regulated Reddit. I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing, at least in many cases, because Reddit can also become a pretty brutal and abusive place. Um. But in other cases you might say, well, this is potentially a restriction on users being able to speak freely, which you know that that has its own problems too, So I get it. But considering some of the conversations I've seen on Reddit and their tone and the language used, Uh, it's an uphill battle. I think for some of those users to argue that it's a bad thing, but I get it, and we don't even know yet, right, it's just a general fear. I think Roku received some very bad news in the United States. The US International Trade Commission or i t C has ruled against Roku in a patent infringement case. A company called Universal Electronics Incorporated brought the case against Roku, saying that the company was infringing on I think six different patents, and the I t C agreed with u EI. That's the Universal Electronics Incorporated. And now I t C has barred the importation and sale of those Roku products. That band will take effect on January nine, twenty two, at which point merchants in the US will no longer be allowed to import and sell those Roku devices to American citizens, and Roku's stock price dropped twelve percent following the news. Finally, the streaming video game market is getting a bit more crowded. Twitch is the dominant player in that space, with YouTube and Facebook also vying to carve out massive slices of the market. But now TikTok is waiting into the field, launching a desktop streaming platform called TikTok Live Studio. It allows users to stream out video gameplay and other desktop applications across TikTok, though for the moment, it appears to be in a limited rollout for testing and it's not always accessible on TikTok itself. Not sure if this will graduate to a full feature for all TikTok users, but I could see the company wanting to tap into its young user base to pull some focus away from Twitch in particular, and that's it. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me. The handle for the show is tech Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. 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.