Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio. And how in the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for Tuesday, July twelve, two thousand twenty two. And let's start by talking about Uber. Now, long time listeners have likely heard me talk about Uber's history, which has included unethical and at least in some cases, potentially illegal activities. And there's really been no secret that Uber engaged in lots of questionable practices in its history and an effort to become the dominant ride hailing company and to quote unquote disrupt the hired car industry, taking aim at taxis and town cars and such. And sure, Uber kind of was marketed as a ride sharing service, but in reality it's a ride hailing service. It's taking the same place as you know, businesses like taxi companies. There were tons of stories about Uber as well as rival company Lift, engaging in Shenanigan's against each other in an effort to undermined or or sabotage the other company, including stories about employees allegedly arranging for rides on the competitor service and then canceling those requests later on in an effort to tie up drivers and frustrate them and to clog up the scheduling systems of the rival company. It all got really ugly. And now we're seeing more about how ugly it actually got, thanks to a whistleblower who handed over more than a hundred twenty thousand internal Uber files that were created between twenty seventeen to various media outlets like The Guardian. The Guardian, by the way, has actually named the whistle blower as a former Uber lobbyists who worked in Europe named Mark McGann. McGann said that Uber's modus OPERANDAI was to quote essentially break the law, show how amazing Uber's service was, and then change the law end quote, and that McGann's work was largely to smooth things over after Uber had gone and disrupted all over the ding dang place, which sounds like a real fun gig, right, Like the bully comes in, pushes people around, then you come around and say, hey, it's not that bad, it's okay. We're gonna we're gonna get through. This guy's the internal documents paint a pretty gross picture. One was something that actually reminds me of an older story, and this was that Uber had a kill switch to prevent law enforcement from accessing company data. In other words, if the police come knocking, you utilize the kill switch to get rid of any incriminating evidence. Now, for one, thing, that makes me think of the good old days when companies like Enron were accused of ordering employees to go on a document shredding spree, Golli the late nineties man. For another, this story actually reminds me of Uber itself, which you know, developed tools specifically to allow drivers in the Portland, Oregon region avoid law enforcement because that was a region where Uber was not given permission to operate. In fact, it was expressly told it would not be allowed to operate there. So Uber said, you know what, We're just gonna go ahead and operate there. We'll just give our drivers the ability to detect police so that they can appear to not be operating there whenever the police are around, you know, everything on the up and up. Other documents indicated more bad news about Travis Kalanik, the former CEO of Uber, who either resigned on his own accord or was strongly encouraged by the board of directors to do so in the wake of multiple scandals about Uber's corporate culture that all broke out in So in this case, the documents suggests that kala Nik was aware of and subsequently dismissed concerns about driver's safety, including instances in which drivers were the victims of violence. Moreover, the document show a pattern of strong arm tactics as well as a rather unflattering betrayal of various government officials who collaborated with Uber under ethically questionable circumstances. So, in other words, these documents start to imply or at least tiptoe up to a line that would mark illegal activities like bribery and coercion, though it may very well be that to the letter of the law, Uber was able to avoid that distinction, not to mention, it also indicates processes on what to do if police were to rate a company office you know that kill switch thing that that is just straight out illegal, and other questionable activities as well, such as paying academics enormous sums like up to a hundred thousand dollars in some cases. Two create reports that helps steer press coverage to paint Uber in a positive light. So essentially, Uber was paying for positive academic studies, and that says a lot both about Uber and the academics who accepted such payments and massaged facts to fit Uber's narrative. You might tell that I'm more than a little upset about that. So side note, any academic who does this is acting terribly. In my mind, it's the kind of crap that brings doubt into any sort of report. Now, you should always look at reports with some skepticism, right, You should ask questions like who funded the study? Who funded the research? That's always going to be important because if it turns out that the reports were paid for by whatever entities were being reported upon, then it's kind of hard to make an argument that the work is unbiased, right, Like, if the checks are coming from the subject of the report, then how critical will the report be? Not in some cases it may still be unbiased, but it does raise those sort of questions, And in this case, Uber was expressly paying for biased reports that are being presented as unbiased, which is pretty gross. Uber, for its part, has said that McGann's documents are about the Uber of the past, you know, pre twenty eighteen Uber, and that the company has since made great strides to clean up its act. And there is no doubt that much of Uber's more recent history has been about damage control and addressing system problems in corporate culture. But the company has also continued to resist calls to designate drivers as employees. I mean, it's impossible to deny the fact that Uber has acted, in extreme cases to try and head off any attempts to classify Uber drivers as employees. Uber also somewhat snarkily pointed out the McGann had demanded a bonus payout upon leaving Uber and seemed reticent to come forward until the check cleared, which you know, shots fired. And maybe that's the case. Maybe McGann was like, I want to make sure I get paid before I start blowing the whistle. And that can raise questions about McGann's own motivations, but it doesn't change the content of those internal documents, right, Like, we can say McGann's actions might be somewhat questionable, but that doesn't change that there are really concerning things within these documents. If Uber has fundamentally put that stuff behind it, that's great. Um, it's the fact that this has come to light and Uber has not really reckoned with that that I think has raised concerns in a lot of people's minds. Let's stick with some more car news now. Have you ever sat in your car and thought, gosh, if only car companies could sell options on a subscription model, sort of like how I subscribed to streaming media or two Xbox game pass, wouldn't that be something No? Well, BMW clearly has thought about this, because the company is now offering up a subscription service in some markets for the luxury of drumroll please, heated seats. So to be clear, these vehicles have all the technology that's needed to heat the seats that's there in the car right off the manufacturing law. However, to enable that ability, the driver will have to subscribe to a service, paying approximately eighteen dollars a month to have it activated. Now, the driver could also choose to subscribe for a whole year for a hundred eighty bucks per year or three years, which would cost three thirty dollars, or to go unloaded access for four fift bucks. Now, this is not the first time BMW has done this sort of thing. By the way, though it's the first I've actually heard of it. There are some other high end features in some BMW models, like adaptive cruise control, that in some markets are also subscription based. Now we don't hear about this much in the United States because BMW hasn't really rolled out most of those features as subscriptions over here. But seeing car manufacturers embrace micro transactions should have folks a little bit concerned, simply because we could see similar strategies deployed in all sorts of different products. It's a proven revenue generating model, and if something works that comes to making money, you can bet that that strategy will proliferate across different businesses. Now let's get back to BMW. So with some features, there is an ongoing cost to BMW. There are back end operations necessary to make certain kinds of options work, and in those cases, a subscription model could be a very valid argument. It could be justifiable. You're thinking, well, yeah, I have to pay per month to have access to this ability in my car, but then BMW has to maintain that service in the back end, so that makes sense. But for something like heated seats, where the entire system is already in the car from the get go. That's a harder sell. In that case, what you're doing is paying a fee to BMW to remove a restriction that's on the vehicle, rather than to provide a new ongoing service. Anyway, in the old days, you would just pay extra upfront to buy a car model that has additional options, you know, like heated seats. BMW appears to want to change that. Maybe in the future all models will have all the options. You'll just have to pay an ongoing fee to access them. Fun times. All right, let's take a quick break. We'll be right back after these messages. We're back with more car news. So over in the EU, the General Vehicle Safety Regulation has taken effect, and part of that regulation includes a requirement that's starting in July of four, all vehicles sold in the EU must include Intelligent Speed Assistance or I s A. And you might be thinking, what the heck is I s A. Technically, it's an it's A. It's a group of anti speeding technologies, and the specific technologies vary from implementation to implementation, because what's really important is the intended goal of this technology. You know, there are a lot of different ways of making it happen. The important thing is that it happens. So the goal is to use technology to first detect what the road speed limits are on whatever road the vehicle is on at the time, and then adjust operations within the vehicle so that the car is not exceeding those road speed limits. Now, apparently this can go so far as to cut power to the engine in the event of someone speeding, which sounds to me like that would be a bit of a risky move, but less drastically, it's meant to signal the driver should they be going a bit too fast. I've been in a car that had a feature like that. It was a car that was imported from Japan, and it would chime at us whenever we would hit the accelerator, which was sometimes necessary to do things like past another vehicle, and it was incredibly irritating, but you know, effective, it convinced us not to drive too fast because we didn't want to hear that chime over and over again. And the goal here is to cut back on traffic accidents and injuries and fatalities, and we see that in results. If we see that those numbers are much lower, it would be very hard to argue against this kind of technology because more people being alive really wins out against just wanting to avoid a frustrating driving experience. Earlier this year, I covered the company Peloton. Actually might have been the end of last year, but that's the company that makes exercise equipment, including the famous bikes and the infamous treadmills, and really makes its money by having a subscription based service to train on those. You have training sessions that you can take using this equipment. The brand got very popular early on in the pandemic, and the company ramped up production, and then demand slacked off rapidly and the company found itself overstocked with products. It was stuffed with inventory and in a lot of trouble, and there were a lot of other problems as well, But I don't want to rehash my old Peloton episode. Instead, the news today is that Peloton will no longer be manufacturing it's own equipment. Instead, it will be partnering with a company in Taiwan and outsourcing its production. The current CEO, Barry McCarthy, is trying to turn the company around, and that's gonna mean cutting way back on expenses. So that explains the decision to outsource manufacturing. Peloton has received a lot of abuse, some of it I think is justifiable, but I never really want to see a company fail, you know, unless that company is just pure evil. My hope is that Peloton will course correct and will find a business model that is sustainable and be able to reset from there. And though I don't own any Peloton products, I don't have any stake in the company, I just kind of hope that the executive team can fix things. I mean, I don't think I know anyone personally who actually owns a Peloton bike or treadmill, but I do know that the enthusiasts who have them are very passionate about the the brand and the training sessions. So I think anything that gets people to exercise is you know, that's kind of a good thing. I sure, as heck, could use more exercise in my life. But yeah, that's why I kind of hope that they succeed. Nothing other than that. The left leaning media watchdog Media Matters has reported that Facebook and Instagram, both of which are owned by Meta, played host to a great deal of anti lgbt Q misinformation and hate speech over the course of June, which of course was Pride Month. The organization accuses Meta of trying to cash in on Pride by claiming to support the l g B t Q community while simultaneously failing to stop the spread of hate speech and misinformation targeting that same community. Media Matters says that right wing media outlets spread lies about Pride events, including allegations that people within the events were specifically attempting to groom children. There's that narrative that we see over and over and in certain extremist literature and media outlets. The organization said, META has failed to enforce its own policy regarding misinformation and hate speech while simultaneously trying to position itself as being kind of a champion of the community. And that's not a good look. The organization pointed out this past Pride Month had several events that were targeted by extremist groups, and Media Matters argues that the lack of enforcement of policies on platforms like Facebook and Instagram can contribute to those kinds of real world outcomes. And you know, we've talked in the past about how these platforms can reinforce beliefs and can promote radicalization and also can serve as a platform for people to plan specific UH activities like like violence or protests at different events, and considering the extent that we've seen some of that via Lens as well as kind of a general move in this country, that being the United States to really push back against the l g B t Q community. It's it's a dangerous thing. It's a dangerous thing for a very vulnerable population. In other Meta news, a couple of different media outlets have reported moves within the company indicating that Meta may be headed towards holding mass layoffs. First, The Information reported that managers received note to identify people on their teams who quote unquote need support and that poor performers should be moved to exit just kind of a lame euphemism for being terminated or fired anyway. The Washington Post subsequently reported that this directive was the first step in managers creating performance improvement plans, which could then be used as sort of a guide for layoffs. And this is not that big of a surprise. Mark Zuckerberg himself has told employees that the company will be more aggressive in setting employee goals and expectations, and that this might commence some folks to leave meta, which is all aces in Mark Zuckerberg's book. And I've said this before, but a lot of company leaders seem to feel that it's better to make a workplace less hospitable and thus push employees to quit rather than to hold layoffs, particularly in cases where the company might be on the hook to cover a severance package. It's way easier to move on if the employee has decided to leave the company on their own, which is again gross. Okay, that's it for the news for today. That's Tuesday, July twelve, two twenty two. If you have suggestions, please let me know. Easiest way to do that is on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio. And how in the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for Tuesday, July twelve, two thousand twenty two. And let's start by talking about Uber. Now, long time listeners have likely heard me talk about Uber's history, which has included unethical and at least in some cases, potentially illegal activities. And there's really been no secret that Uber engaged in lots of questionable practices in its history and an effort to become the dominant ride hailing company and to quote unquote disrupt the hired car industry, taking aim at taxis and town cars and such. And sure, Uber kind of was marketed as a ride sharing service, but in reality it's a ride hailing service. It's taking the same place as you know, businesses like taxi companies. There were tons of stories about Uber as well as rival company Lift, engaging in Shenanigan's against each other in an effort to undermined or or sabotage the other company, including stories about employees allegedly arranging for rides on the competitor service and then canceling those requests later on in an effort to tie up drivers and frustrate them and to clog up the scheduling systems of the rival company. It all got really ugly. And now we're seeing more about how ugly it actually got, thanks to a whistleblower who handed over more than a hundred twenty thousand internal Uber files that were created between twenty seventeen to various media outlets like The Guardian. The Guardian, by the way, has actually named the whistle blower as a former Uber lobbyists who worked in Europe named Mark McGann. McGann said that Uber's modus OPERANDAI was to quote essentially break the law, show how amazing Uber's service was, and then change the law end quote, and that McGann's work was largely to smooth things over after Uber had gone and disrupted all over the ding dang place, which sounds like a real fun gig, right, Like the bully comes in, pushes people around, then you come around and say, hey, it's not that bad, it's okay. We're gonna we're gonna get through. This guy's the internal documents paint a pretty gross picture. One was something that actually reminds me of an older story, and this was that Uber had a kill switch to prevent law enforcement from accessing company data. In other words, if the police come knocking, you utilize the kill switch to get rid of any incriminating evidence. Now, for one, thing, that makes me think of the good old days when companies like Enron were accused of ordering employees to go on a document shredding spree, Golli the late nineties man. For another, this story actually reminds me of Uber itself, which you know, developed tools specifically to allow drivers in the Portland, Oregon region avoid law enforcement because that was a region where Uber was not given permission to operate. In fact, it was expressly told it would not be allowed to operate there. So Uber said, you know what, We're just gonna go ahead and operate there. We'll just give our drivers the ability to detect police so that they can appear to not be operating there whenever the police are around, you know, everything on the up and up. Other documents indicated more bad news about Travis Kalanik, the former CEO of Uber, who either resigned on his own accord or was strongly encouraged by the board of directors to do so in the wake of multiple scandals about Uber's corporate culture that all broke out in So in this case, the documents suggests that kala Nik was aware of and subsequently dismissed concerns about driver's safety, including instances in which drivers were the victims of violence. Moreover, the document show a pattern of strong arm tactics as well as a rather unflattering betrayal of various government officials who collaborated with Uber under ethically questionable circumstances. So, in other words, these documents start to imply or at least tiptoe up to a line that would mark illegal activities like bribery and coercion, though it may very well be that to the letter of the law, Uber was able to avoid that distinction, not to mention, it also indicates processes on what to do if police were to rate a company office you know that kill switch thing that that is just straight out illegal, and other questionable activities as well, such as paying academics enormous sums like up to a hundred thousand dollars in some cases. Two create reports that helps steer press coverage to paint Uber in a positive light. So essentially, Uber was paying for positive academic studies, and that says a lot both about Uber and the academics who accepted such payments and massaged facts to fit Uber's narrative. You might tell that I'm more than a little upset about that. So side note, any academic who does this is acting terribly. In my mind, it's the kind of crap that brings doubt into any sort of report. Now, you should always look at reports with some skepticism, right, You should ask questions like who funded the study? Who funded the research? That's always going to be important because if it turns out that the reports were paid for by whatever entities were being reported upon, then it's kind of hard to make an argument that the work is unbiased, right, Like, if the checks are coming from the subject of the report, then how critical will the report be? Not in some cases it may still be unbiased, but it does raise those sort of questions, And in this case, Uber was expressly paying for biased reports that are being presented as unbiased, which is pretty gross. Uber, for its part, has said that McGann's documents are about the Uber of the past, you know, pre twenty eighteen Uber, and that the company has since made great strides to clean up its act. And there is no doubt that much of Uber's more recent history has been about damage control and addressing system problems in corporate culture. But the company has also continued to resist calls to designate drivers as employees. I mean, it's impossible to deny the fact that Uber has acted, in extreme cases to try and head off any attempts to classify Uber drivers as employees. Uber also somewhat snarkily pointed out the McGann had demanded a bonus payout upon leaving Uber and seemed reticent to come forward until the check cleared, which you know, shots fired. And maybe that's the case. Maybe McGann was like, I want to make sure I get paid before I start blowing the whistle. And that can raise questions about McGann's own motivations, but it doesn't change the content of those internal documents, right, Like, we can say McGann's actions might be somewhat questionable, but that doesn't change that there are really concerning things within these documents. If Uber has fundamentally put that stuff behind it, that's great. Um, it's the fact that this has come to light and Uber has not really reckoned with that that I think has raised concerns in a lot of people's minds. Let's stick with some more car news now. Have you ever sat in your car and thought, gosh, if only car companies could sell options on a subscription model, sort of like how I subscribed to streaming media or two Xbox game pass, wouldn't that be something No? Well, BMW clearly has thought about this, because the company is now offering up a subscription service in some markets for the luxury of drumroll please, heated seats. So to be clear, these vehicles have all the technology that's needed to heat the seats that's there in the car right off the manufacturing law. However, to enable that ability, the driver will have to subscribe to a service, paying approximately eighteen dollars a month to have it activated. Now, the driver could also choose to subscribe for a whole year for a hundred eighty bucks per year or three years, which would cost three thirty dollars, or to go unloaded access for four fift bucks. Now, this is not the first time BMW has done this sort of thing. By the way, though it's the first I've actually heard of it. There are some other high end features in some BMW models, like adaptive cruise control, that in some markets are also subscription based. Now we don't hear about this much in the United States because BMW hasn't really rolled out most of those features as subscriptions over here. But seeing car manufacturers embrace micro transactions should have folks a little bit concerned, simply because we could see similar strategies deployed in all sorts of different products. It's a proven revenue generating model, and if something works that comes to making money, you can bet that that strategy will proliferate across different businesses. Now let's get back to BMW. So with some features, there is an ongoing cost to BMW. There are back end operations necessary to make certain kinds of options work, and in those cases, a subscription model could be a very valid argument. It could be justifiable. You're thinking, well, yeah, I have to pay per month to have access to this ability in my car, but then BMW has to maintain that service in the back end, so that makes sense. But for something like heated seats, where the entire system is already in the car from the get go. That's a harder sell. In that case, what you're doing is paying a fee to BMW to remove a restriction that's on the vehicle, rather than to provide a new ongoing service. Anyway, in the old days, you would just pay extra upfront to buy a car model that has additional options, you know, like heated seats. BMW appears to want to change that. Maybe in the future all models will have all the options. You'll just have to pay an ongoing fee to access them. Fun times. All right, let's take a quick break. We'll be right back after these messages. We're back with more car news. So over in the EU, the General Vehicle Safety Regulation has taken effect, and part of that regulation includes a requirement that's starting in July of four, all vehicles sold in the EU must include Intelligent Speed Assistance or I s A. And you might be thinking, what the heck is I s A. Technically, it's an it's A. It's a group of anti speeding technologies, and the specific technologies vary from implementation to implementation, because what's really important is the intended goal of this technology. You know, there are a lot of different ways of making it happen. The important thing is that it happens. So the goal is to use technology to first detect what the road speed limits are on whatever road the vehicle is on at the time, and then adjust operations within the vehicle so that the car is not exceeding those road speed limits. Now, apparently this can go so far as to cut power to the engine in the event of someone speeding, which sounds to me like that would be a bit of a risky move, but less drastically, it's meant to signal the driver should they be going a bit too fast. I've been in a car that had a feature like that. It was a car that was imported from Japan, and it would chime at us whenever we would hit the accelerator, which was sometimes necessary to do things like past another vehicle, and it was incredibly irritating, but you know, effective, it convinced us not to drive too fast because we didn't want to hear that chime over and over again. And the goal here is to cut back on traffic accidents and injuries and fatalities, and we see that in results. If we see that those numbers are much lower, it would be very hard to argue against this kind of technology because more people being alive really wins out against just wanting to avoid a frustrating driving experience. Earlier this year, I covered the company Peloton. Actually might have been the end of last year, but that's the company that makes exercise equipment, including the famous bikes and the infamous treadmills, and really makes its money by having a subscription based service to train on those. You have training sessions that you can take using this equipment. The brand got very popular early on in the pandemic, and the company ramped up production, and then demand slacked off rapidly and the company found itself overstocked with products. It was stuffed with inventory and in a lot of trouble, and there were a lot of other problems as well, But I don't want to rehash my old Peloton episode. Instead, the news today is that Peloton will no longer be manufacturing it's own equipment. Instead, it will be partnering with a company in Taiwan and outsourcing its production. The current CEO, Barry McCarthy, is trying to turn the company around, and that's gonna mean cutting way back on expenses. So that explains the decision to outsource manufacturing. Peloton has received a lot of abuse, some of it I think is justifiable, but I never really want to see a company fail, you know, unless that company is just pure evil. My hope is that Peloton will course correct and will find a business model that is sustainable and be able to reset from there. And though I don't own any Peloton products, I don't have any stake in the company, I just kind of hope that the executive team can fix things. I mean, I don't think I know anyone personally who actually owns a Peloton bike or treadmill, but I do know that the enthusiasts who have them are very passionate about the the brand and the training sessions. So I think anything that gets people to exercise is you know, that's kind of a good thing. I sure, as heck, could use more exercise in my life. But yeah, that's why I kind of hope that they succeed. Nothing other than that. The left leaning media watchdog Media Matters has reported that Facebook and Instagram, both of which are owned by Meta, played host to a great deal of anti lgbt Q misinformation and hate speech over the course of June, which of course was Pride Month. The organization accuses Meta of trying to cash in on Pride by claiming to support the l g B t Q community while simultaneously failing to stop the spread of hate speech and misinformation targeting that same community. Media Matters says that right wing media outlets spread lies about Pride events, including allegations that people within the events were specifically attempting to groom children. There's that narrative that we see over and over and in certain extremist literature and media outlets. The organization said, META has failed to enforce its own policy regarding misinformation and hate speech while simultaneously trying to position itself as being kind of a champion of the community. And that's not a good look. The organization pointed out this past Pride Month had several events that were targeted by extremist groups, and Media Matters argues that the lack of enforcement of policies on platforms like Facebook and Instagram can contribute to those kinds of real world outcomes. And you know, we've talked in the past about how these platforms can reinforce beliefs and can promote radicalization and also can serve as a platform for people to plan specific UH activities like like violence or protests at different events, and considering the extent that we've seen some of that via Lens as well as kind of a general move in this country, that being the United States to really push back against the l g B t Q community. It's it's a dangerous thing. It's a dangerous thing for a very vulnerable population. In other Meta news, a couple of different media outlets have reported moves within the company indicating that Meta may be headed towards holding mass layoffs. First, The Information reported that managers received note to identify people on their teams who quote unquote need support and that poor performers should be moved to exit just kind of a lame euphemism for being terminated or fired anyway. The Washington Post subsequently reported that this directive was the first step in managers creating performance improvement plans, which could then be used as sort of a guide for layoffs. And this is not that big of a surprise. Mark Zuckerberg himself has told employees that the company will be more aggressive in setting employee goals and expectations, and that this might commence some folks to leave meta, which is all aces in Mark Zuckerberg's book. And I've said this before, but a lot of company leaders seem to feel that it's better to make a workplace less hospitable and thus push employees to quit rather than to hold layoffs, particularly in cases where the company might be on the hook to cover a severance package. It's way easier to move on if the employee has decided to leave the company on their own, which is again gross. Okay, that's it for the news for today. That's Tuesday, July twelve, two twenty two. If you have suggestions, please let me know. Easiest way to do that is on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.