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 I love all things tech and it is time for the tech news for Tuesday, October five, twenty one. Let's get at it. Chances are you are aware that yesterday Facebook and all of its services went offline for several hours. That includes Facebook itself, Messenger, Instagram, What's That, and Oculus VR. The outage began at approximately eleven forty a m. Eastern time. That's when facebooks records on the domain name system suddenly went So. The domain name system or d n S is like an address or or phone book for the Internet. So you probably know about IP addresses, those numerical addresses, especially I p v four is numerical, I p v six is a mix. But this is how say a web browser connects to a specific web page. It actually connects through an I p address. But IP addresses are not easy for most humans to remember because again they just look like a jumble of numbers or with I p v six numbers and possibly letters. So we use words for our u r ls like Facebook dot Com, for example, and the d n S translates those words, which doesn't you know, words don't really mean anything to web browsers. That's just how we navigate the web. And so d n S says, all right, well, let me look and see what I P address that particular series of words relates to, and then serves that up. Now, on Facebook's case, the problems seemed to be that Facebook somehow, probably through a miscon figuration, eliminated its Border Gateway Protocol or b GP route. This is kind of like a map of how data can get to Facebook's servers. Facebook servers published this route to neighboring servers, and they propagated outwards. So it's kind of like if you're driving through an unfamiliar town and you stop to ask a local for directions. You say something like, hey, do you happen to know the way to get to Facebook, and they say, well, yeah, go down this road a peace and when you see the sign for Old Donigan's farm, you turn left. Now, if you pass an ambulatory scarecrow, you've done gone too far, except because Facebook withdrew the b g P. If you were to stop and ask for directions, and say do you know the way to Facebook? You would get the answer you can't get that from hreh. But wait, it gets worse. See Facebook's systems are all internal ones built on these computers that connect to these particular servers. That got effect of Lee severed from the Internet and the loss of the b g P meant that not only could you as a user no longer check your Facebook or Instagram or use WhatsApp, and you couldn't play Oculus VR. If you were a Facebook employee, you couldn't access your internal systems. You might not even be able to access the building I saw. One person suggests that the security system itself is tied into those servers and that your security badge wouldn't work to let you in in that case. Also, Facebook has Facebook log In. This is where you know various apps use your Facebook login for you to access the app. That way, you don't create a user name and a password for that specific app. Instead, you use your Facebook login. Well, with Facebook servers down, there was no way to authenticate that. So if you were not actually actively signed into those services, you might have found it impossible to connect to all those apps. It took several hours to reconfigure the b GP routes, and that has made more complicated because obviously the computers that you would normally use to reconfigure that were the same ones that were you know, quote unquote disappeared from the Internet. So it was a pretty rough day for Facebook. Now, this was just part of the drama that Facebook is currently going through. On Sunday this past Sunday, former Facebook employee Francis Howgan appeared on Sixty Minutes and it turns out that Francis is the person who leaked internal research documents to the Wall Street Journal. You know, the studies that showed that Facebook researchers were concerned that Instagram was harmful to mental health, particularly for teenage girl who girls who were using the service um and that Facebook was well aware of how misinformation was spreading across the platform and how the algorithm was elevating misinformation campaigns. On the interview, she alleged that Facebook, when faced with a decision to either go for making a profit or go with an option that would be better for users, would always choose the profit option every single time. Today, she has scheduled to appear before the United States Senate to answer questions about her former employer, And of course we have been having ongoing conversations within the government, the US government and the European government as well about whether or not Facebook represents a monopoly and if perhaps it might be a good idea to, you know, force the company to divest itself of properties like Instagram and WhatsApp. Now, I've also seen some people suggest that somehow the outage yesterday was linked to the hearing that's happening today and and the sixty minutes expose that had happened on Sunday, that perhaps someone over at Facebook was trying to hide something and just took extreme measures. But that doesn't seem like that doesn't seem to hold up even under casual screw utiny. I would argue that the outage hurt the company big time, and at the worst possible moment for Facebook, for one thing, because Facebook went down and all these various integrated services then became unavailable. The people who say Facebook has too much influence have way more ammunition, right, because millions of people rely on, say, WhatsApp to stay in touch with family and friends around the world, including vulnerable populations who use WhatsApp in order to maintain contact with people, like say, back in Africa or in South America. But because WhatsApp runs on Facebook's systems, that whole service became unavailable globally for like six hours. This, the critics argue, is what happens when we put all of our digital eggs in one social media platforms basket. Right, If we have our logins tied to Facebook, If the service as we rely upon to stay in touch with everybody are part of Facebook and Facebook goes down, all of that becomes unavailable to us. That, as the argument goes, is an argument against this kind of consolidation that we've been seeing with platforms like Facebook, where you know, they're not just building out their own tools, they're buying up tools that overlap what Facebook already does. A lot of people have pointed out over the years that Facebook has acquired companies when it became clear that Facebook itself was not going to be able to compete against those companies, and those companies potentially stood as a threat when it comes to getting people to spend more and more time on Facebook. Now, beyond those pieces of evidence that suggests that this is not something that the company would have wanted Bloomberg estimated that the outage and the dip and Facebook's stock price, which has been going on since, you know, earlier in September. UH, that also meant that CEO Mark Zuckerberg saw his wealth decreased by around seven billion dollars. Now that is beyond a princely some obviously, and that's not to say that he won't regain that wealth now that Facebook is back up and running. Maybe he will. Maybe the company's UH stock prices will improve, although with the hearing in front of the U. S. Senate that's not certain. I would argue no one would authorize some sort of extreme pull the plug UH strategy at the cost of seven billion bucks. I'm pretty confident this was all coincidental. It was a miss configuration, It was not done on purpose, and it was just supremely bad timing for Facebook for all this to happen at once. Will the U. S. Government force Facebook to say bye bye to Instagram and WhatsApp? I honestly don't know. There is precedent. We have seen the government break up big company years before, but it hasn't happened in a long time, and I'm not sure that it will happen in this case. However, I figure there's never been a time with more obvious support for that argument than right now. Yesterday really brought that into, you know, into the light. Last week, I reported that Amazon would hold a hardware reveal event, but that my recording session happened before the event occurred, so I couldn't actually say what they were going to show off. I did mention that the Verge had predicted a wall mounted echo device, and we got one. It's called the Echo Show. But that site also predicted we wouldn't see anything about the robot that Amazon had had in development for a few years at that point. However, Amazon surprised us all and in fact brought out a robot that it now calls Astro. The robot will initially sell to a limited customer base by invitation only, so you actually have to request and invite, and you must hand over the princely sum of nine dollars to buy it. Later on, that price is actually going to go up to around one tho. The robot has a tablet like screen for a face, like it's got these digital eyes. Essentially kind of looks a little bit like Wally from the Pixar film. It moves around on two twelve inch wheels, and it's got a little castor like wheel in the back to provide more stability. It's got cameras, including a five megapixel camera built into the screen, but it's also got a periscope camera it can extend and use to look around at surroundings. It's got a speaker, it's got a microphone. It has facial recognition technology built into it. It can learn a map of your home, so you can have it learned the layout of your home and assigned specific names to specific rooms. Thus, you could tell your robot, hey, you know, go to the kitchen and it would navigate over to the chin from wherever it happened to be. Um. It's got all the Alexa capabilities built into it so that it can respond to the request that you would typically use to ask Alexa for stuff like what the weather is, or to play a certain song and all that kind of stuff. Not everyone is sold on this robot. The m I T Technology Review has called the robot stupid. The Verge ran a follow up piece saying that developers who had worked on the robot had reportedly called it terrible and claimed it would make dumb mistakes such as throwing itself off the stairs, So if you have stairs in your home, you might not want to have this thing on an upper level. I think I would advise folks to maybe pump the brakes a bit before shelling out a grand or more for this thing. While we have stuff like room Buzz and those are reasonably popular, we're really still waiting on the household robot that is a must buy. I've seen a lot of people suggest that this robot doesn't do a whole really when you get down to it, and the stuff that it does do, it doesn't necessarily do super well, so it's not like a wise purchasing decision. Um. I mean, it would potentially give Amazon a lot more opportunities to figure out how to sell stuff to you. I mean, if they've got essentially a computer that can move around your house and observe stuff, then you could argue this could just be another way for Amazon to position itself in order to sell more products to customers. And frankly, I suspect that that is a large part of it. And you you have to pay for that privilege, right, You have to pay like a thousand dollars or more in order to have the privilege of having a surveillance device that is potentially giving more information to a company to sell you more stuff. Anyway. Besides the robot and the wall mounted Echo Show, which again is like a smart display that you can attach to a wall, we also saw the Echo Glow. This is a table top tablet for video conferencing for kids, and it's meant to appeal to children so that they video conference with distant friends and family and they don't get bored and just wander off. That was what Amazon said. The purpose was behind the design. So in this case, the tablet actually has incorporated inside of it a projector. The projector can display stuff on the tabletop in front of the tablet. It even comes with like a white mat. It's kind of like a movie screen, so you lay the mat down, you put the tablet behind the mat, and it can project a screen down on the mat that's on the table. Uh that can become an interactive story book, you can become a game. And there are infrared sensors inside the tablet so it can track things like hand motion, so when you're you know, moving stuff around on this screen, it's acting almost like a touch screen. It's kind of a neat idea. I'm not entirely sold on it, but then I also don't have any kids, so um. Amazon also revealed a smart thermostat fitness track your devices, and also a version of its Echo device specifically designed for Disney properties. So in the future, should you stay at like a Walt Disney World resort, you might find that there is a Disney themed Echo and you can use it to ask questions like checking on dining reservations or asking about park hours, that kind of stuff. Um, I was not super impressed with the Amazon presentation, but then I also don't want this to be an Amazon ad. So we're just gonna go to break and listen to other ads and then come back with some more news and we're back. Researchers at Trendy College in Dublin, Ireland, which by the way, is one of my favorite spots in Ireland, have released a research paper that looked into how much data iOS and Android devices gather from their respective users. The paper says that both operating systems send packets of data back to you know, their their respective h q s approximately every four and a half minutes. Whether you're using it or not. This happens even if you've gone to the trouble of setting all data sharing options to off. Keep in mind, some data sharing isn't optional, it's mandatory. And the study did find some differences between the two. Google, they said, collects much larger volumes of data. The size of packets that Google sending back is much greater than what Apple is doing. However, Apple, while sending less data, overall, sent a wider variety of data, including data about other devices that are connected to whichever network you connect to. Android doesn't do that, so Apple is interested in what other devices are on the same network you're on. I guess. The Google reps have said this is really just kind of how smartphones work. They compared it to how modern day vehicles have components that send data back to car companies for safety purposes. The researchers said that if users really want to limit how much of your data your phone collects and shares, you should really go with an Android phone because despite the fact that it's sending more data, you have more options. You can have network connections disabled when you activate your phone, and you should also disabled Google Play and YouTube, and the Google Play Store. That cuts down on most of the data collection. You would still need to sideload apps and get them from someplace other than the Google Play Store in order to avoid that data collection. Even then, you're just minimizing the amount of data that's being collected and shared. They did say that Apple users are just out of lock because Apple requires a network connection to activate an iPhone. So Apple users are subjected to data collection no matter what they do. Speaking of Apple, the Wall Street Journal parts that Apple made more operating profit from games than Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and Activision Blizzard combined. And Apple doesn't make games, but profited more from games than all those other companies. Al Right, so in some ways this actually is not a big surprise, right. I Mean we're talking operating profit, we're not talking revenue. So companies like Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony, and Activision Blizzard they actually make games. Now that means that there are costs associated with that business. You know, Profit is what you've got after you've accounted for the costs of producing whatever it is you're producing. So if I decide I'm going to go and make a chair, and I sell that chair for fifty dollars, but it turns out the materials cost me sixty dollars. Well, I lost money on that, right, I didn't make a profit. That's a loss. While Apple generates revenue by taking a cut of all digital sales up to in some cases, so Apple gets a slice of the pie, which is I guess, Apple pie. Every time someone purchases a game from the Apple App Store, or and this is really important, they get a slice of the pie if a person makes an in game purchase on an app that was taken from the Apple App Store. Apple has been going through a series of court cases about those in game purchases, having recently been ordered by a judge to offer alternatives or allow for alternatives to Apple's own in app purchasing system. This would give users the option to go with something else and not go through Apple. This is at the heart of the matter between Apple and Epic Games, the creator of Fortnite. So again, yes, Apple has made more profiting games than official game companies, but then Apple also doesn't have to have the expense of development for those. A man named O N. D As, a former elevator operator at Tesla, sued the company, charging that Tesla is a hostile work environment, and that he and other employees were the targets for things like racial slurs and intimidation. A court found in his favor, and the court has awarded him some one seven million dollars or so in damages. Now, one thing that makes this story really important is the fact that Diaz was even able to sue at all. Tesla, like a lot of tech companies, has a policy that requires employees to sign an arbitration agreement. Now, these agreements say that employees must work within company systems to resolve problems. They are not allowed to go outside the company and say, address the media or sue the company in a court and take it to a public trial. However, Diaz never signed that kind of an agreement, so he wasn't held to those restrictions. He could sue without breaking an agreement he had made with the company. And you might even say, hah, kind of sounds to me like these sorts of agreements would allow for a toxic work environment to flourish, and that there would be no real way you could address it because all the disputes have to be handled internally, and if the system is rotten, then you'll never come out on top because the game is stacked against you from the beginning. You would not be the only person to think that way. In fact, one of one of the the investors of Tesla, an organization called NIA Impact Capital Um, has sent uh the board of directors a request to review this arbitration policy, raising concerns that the policy enables harassment. Now, I would go even further than that. I would say it encourages harassment. Also, I mean, is it just me or do you sense that there's like a growing labor movement in the United States? You know, I think we're still in the very early stages and it could just fizzle out. But I also feel like younger generations in particular are getting a bit more head up about the status quo, and they're demanding things change or they won't play ball. And hey, young folks, I am with you on this one. You know, I might not understand your squid games and your TikTok's, but I'm all for overhauling the labor system. Also, here's hoping Tesla cracks down on those internal problems and really does try to change that toxic work environment. It would be really nice to hear about companies actually making substantial transformational changes in workplaces and find a place where employees are all treated with respect and dignity, which I know that's crazy talk, but it would be a nice change of pace from the stories we constantly get about companies that have terrible work environments, really demoralized employees, and just it just sounds like the worst. So I am hoping that Tesla makes those changes. Also, I hope that we start to see more resistance to this trend of arbitration agreements being put in place. It's just a way for companies to protect themselves at the expense of their employees. And I don't think that's I don't when we're talking about protection, I don't think it's the companies that need to be protected. I think it's the individual employees who need the protection. Again, that's my own opinion. Sticking with cars, since we just talked about Tesla, let's chat a bit about California because it's that state's Department of Motor Vehicles that just granted permits to a pair of self driving car companies, that being Way Moo and Cruise. They both have been given permits to operate light duty self driving taxi cabs in San Francisco and in way most case beyond. But these permits do come with some restrictions. However, they're not open ended. So in cruises case, that company's cabs will only be able to operate between ten pm and six am, so they can only operate it overnight. They are allowed a maximum speed of thirty miles per hour, and they can't operate during particularly foggy or rainy conditions. I actually find that ten pm to six am really odd. I mean, maybe it's to avoid traffic. Um. I was trying to find more confirmation on this and make sure that it wasn't just a transcription error and that they didn't they didn't mean between six am and ten pm, but rather ten pm and six am. I I don't know, so I'm just going with what the press release said. So, since we're talking San Francisco, and this does limit when the vehicles can operate and they can't operate in bad weather, it really does restrict when they would be able to two autonomously drive the streets of San Francisco. WAYMO, which is part of Alphabet that's the company that's also apparent to Google, gets a bit more leeway the way MOO cars will be authorized to travel up to sixty five miles per hour, so they could go on too highways. They can go beyond just San Francisco, but not the entire state. Uh. They don't appear to have a limitation on when they are allowed to operate, so we don't have like restricted hours for waymo as far as I can suss out. They also are not allowed to drive if the weather is too nasty, so that restriction does still apply. But does this actually mean that robo taxis are right now prowling the streets of San Francisco. Not quite yet, because the companies will still need to get approval from California's Public Utilities Commission, and that commission might have more restrictions or more requirements. Uh, so we'll have to just keep an eye out for it. Last week, the website Lyons posted an essay written primarily by Alexandra Abrams, who used to be the head of Blue Origins employee Communications. Blue Origin, in case you don't recall, is Amazon founder Jeff Bezos's space industry company anyway, Abrams, in around twenty other folks who either work or have worked for Blue Origin, detailed that the company has a truly toxic work culture seems to be a common theme. The essay alleges that numerous male senior leaders have acted inappropriately with women, including one who CEO Bob Smith, would then appoint as part of a hiring committee for a senior HR position. Now, in case that didn't quite register with you, I'll put it in in another way, a guy who had numerous sexual harassment claims against him was then put on a committee in charge of finding a human resources executive. That's like giving an inmate in solitary confinement the authority to choose who the warden is for the prison. The essay lists several incidents and examples and makes the case that Blue Origins work environment is harmful, and it's harmful to productivity, it's harmful to mental health and Abrahams also said that many of the authors of the essay would never go up on a Blue Origin rocket out of concerns for safety, because they said that the work conditions were so intense and so rushed that they feel that safety has been uh neglected too much. Meanwhile, Blue Origin has announced that William Shatner is scheduled to go up on the next trip, so they're going with all systems go. I guess Today representatives from Microsoft, Google, and Amazon will be meeting with the US government's Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House to talk about quantum computing. Now, for those who are not familiar with that term, quantum computing involves the strange world of quantum mechanics. So your classic computers operate by processing information in the form of binary digits or bits, and a bit can be a zero or a one. It's kind of like a light switch. It's either off or it's on. But quantum computers use what we call cubits or quantum bits. Now, these can be a zero, a one, anything in between, and all of them at the same time. Quantum computing get involve strange stuff like superposition. That it's what we were just talking about. Superposition is where you have a quantum element that can occupy all possible states simultaneously. It would be like if you could be awake in a sleep at the same time. You know, those are two different states. That's kind of what superposition is, but it only applies to the quantum world, alright, So anyone who's trying to sell you anything about superposition that could be observed in our classical universe, they're full of it. That is not the way the world works. Quantum computers can also involve entanglement. Now, this is where you have the state of one quantum element tied to the state of another, no matter how far apart those two quantum elements are, and by observing one of those two you can tell what the state of the other one was at that exact moment. So let's talk about electron spin. This is a pretty common one. Let's say that you've got two entangled electrons. One of them is spinning up and the other one spinning down. And let's say that they're a universe apart. It doesn't matter as long as they're tied together. So while one spinning up, the other one spinning down, you observe the one of them. You see that spinning up, You know the other one was spinning down. However, the crazy thing about the quantum world is that when you start to observe things, you actually change their behavior, and things like entanglement breakdown. So while you might be able to say at that specific moment that other electron was spinning down, you don't know what it's doing now because the entanglement has been severed. Now quantum computers can solve a subset of computational problems with insane speed, assuming that the quantum computer has enough cubits to do it, and that you have developed an algorithm that can tackle that sort of problem. And these are computational problems that would take classic computers hundreds or thousands or millions of years to complete, and you can do it relatively quickly with a quantum computer. Now, it doesn't apply for all types of computational problems. So in other words, you wouldn't want to use a quantum computer to play call of duty because it wouldn't work nearly as well as a classic computer would. Anyway, the experts from Microsoft and Amazon and Google are meeting today to talk about possible future applications of quantum computing, some of which relate to security. Encryption is one of those things that quantum computers could really disrupt, because with a sufficiently powerful quantum computer and the right algorithm, you could potentially break even the toughest encryption schemes in a very little amount of time. It's amazing and also kind of scary. We have a couple more stories to get to But before we do that, let's take another quick break. So, in the continuing battle against robo calls, the United States Federal Communications Commission or FCC is considering new restrictions on domestic gateway providers and they would have to follow these new rules to cut back on robocalls that originate outside the United States. All right, this gets to how do you deal with a problem that doesn't necessarily originate inside your own country? Right? We see this with the Internet, and we see it with the telephone system because the FCC doesn't have jurisdiction outside the United States, right Like, they can't, you know, the f c C can't go to a German telephone company and say, hey, knock it off, because the FCC has no authority over telecommunications companies that are outside the United States, and yet illegal robocalls from other nations are a real problem. So the FCC's proposal is to require gateway phone companies. These are US based companies that accept and facilitate calls that are coming from outside the country and routing them to the correct you know, phone line in inside the country. They will be required to verify the accuracy of color I D and to authenticate that a call is legitimate, or presumably they would have to block it. The FCC has already created protocols called Stir and Shaken, which are meant to crack down on US based robo calls. And here's hoping that these proposals become actual rules and that we see a dramatic decrease in robo calls as a result. I don't know about any of you, but for me, I answer maybe one call out of twenty that comes to my phone because the vast majority of calls I get our numbers, I don't recognize. Most of them never bother to leave a message once it goes to voicemail. The ones that do, it's prerecorded nonsense. That doesn't you know, it's nothing important. It's like you need to renew this warranty that I don't have on often on something that I don't own, so it's not not something that I really want. And it would be really nice if you know, when my phone rings, I could be reasonably sure that it's from someone I know and possibly someone I want to talk to, or maybe like I know, oh, that call is coming from you know, the power company, and they're letting me know about maybe a planned outage in order to do some work in the neighborhood. Those are the kind of calls where, yeah, I'd kind of like to be able to get them, but I don't get anything because I just let them all go to voicemail because there are too many robocalls. All right, I know, you know this is a problem. If you have a phone, you're aware of it. I'll be quiet now. Finally, the activist group Anonymous, which honestly I kind of lost tabs on for a while. They I'm not sure if they went quiet or if I just stopped, you know, hearing about their exploits. Anyway. UH, some group that's associated with Anonymous has been actively defacing a Chinese government website that promotes tourism in China. The group has repeatedly altered that website, adding in images, a lot of them images of various leaders that the Chinese government has vilified, and UH also sending in messages that call for people who visit the website to reject communism and authoritarianism. I'm not sure how effective those strategies are when you're targeting a tourism page, but it does show how Anonymous will use a combination of subversion and you know, kind of juvenile memes to poke at a target. The group says it discovered that the server hosting the site was using default password credentials. That speaks really poorly of that website's approach to security. As a rule, you should always change the default password settings on all your network devices, otherwise you run the risk of someone using the default password credentials to access your stuff and mess with it. I don't have to guess your password if you've never changed it. If I try to log into your router and I use admin and password as the credentials and it gets in, that's really on you because you didn't take the steps to I mean it's on me too, I'm the jerk who's trying to access your system, but it's on you for also for not taking the steps to change those defaults. So changing defaults is really good Anonymous in case you're not familiar with them. It's a very loose organization, actually using the word organization as even a little grandiose. It's a collective of hackers and activists who will target various companies and individuals for different reasons. Sometimes it's to fight against what is seen as authoritarian regimes. Sometimes it's to fight against companies that are seen to be hypocritical. Uh, it really just depends, and there's no centralized leadership. Really. You can have people who sort of take the lead on specific initiatives, but it's a very loose collective at which works to the group's both benefit and detriment. It all depends on what anyone's trying to do. All right, that's it for the tech News for Tuesday, October one. Will be back later in the week with more tech News and more episodes of tech Stuff. If you have any suggestions for topics I should cover on the show, reach out to me on Twitter. The handle is text stuff h s W and I'll 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 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 I love all things tech and it is time for the tech news for Tuesday, October five, twenty one. Let's get at it. Chances are you are aware that yesterday Facebook and all of its services went offline for several hours. That includes Facebook itself, Messenger, Instagram, What's That, and Oculus VR. The outage began at approximately eleven forty a m. Eastern time. That's when facebooks records on the domain name system suddenly went So. The domain name system or d n S is like an address or or phone book for the Internet. So you probably know about IP addresses, those numerical addresses, especially I p v four is numerical, I p v six is a mix. But this is how say a web browser connects to a specific web page. It actually connects through an I p address. But IP addresses are not easy for most humans to remember because again they just look like a jumble of numbers or with I p v six numbers and possibly letters. So we use words for our u r ls like Facebook dot Com, for example, and the d n S translates those words, which doesn't you know, words don't really mean anything to web browsers. That's just how we navigate the web. And so d n S says, all right, well, let me look and see what I P address that particular series of words relates to, and then serves that up. Now, on Facebook's case, the problems seemed to be that Facebook somehow, probably through a miscon figuration, eliminated its Border Gateway Protocol or b GP route. This is kind of like a map of how data can get to Facebook's servers. Facebook servers published this route to neighboring servers, and they propagated outwards. So it's kind of like if you're driving through an unfamiliar town and you stop to ask a local for directions. You say something like, hey, do you happen to know the way to get to Facebook, and they say, well, yeah, go down this road a peace and when you see the sign for Old Donigan's farm, you turn left. Now, if you pass an ambulatory scarecrow, you've done gone too far, except because Facebook withdrew the b g P. If you were to stop and ask for directions, and say do you know the way to Facebook? You would get the answer you can't get that from hreh. But wait, it gets worse. See Facebook's systems are all internal ones built on these computers that connect to these particular servers. That got effect of Lee severed from the Internet and the loss of the b g P meant that not only could you as a user no longer check your Facebook or Instagram or use WhatsApp, and you couldn't play Oculus VR. If you were a Facebook employee, you couldn't access your internal systems. You might not even be able to access the building I saw. One person suggests that the security system itself is tied into those servers and that your security badge wouldn't work to let you in in that case. Also, Facebook has Facebook log In. This is where you know various apps use your Facebook login for you to access the app. That way, you don't create a user name and a password for that specific app. Instead, you use your Facebook login. Well, with Facebook servers down, there was no way to authenticate that. So if you were not actually actively signed into those services, you might have found it impossible to connect to all those apps. It took several hours to reconfigure the b GP routes, and that has made more complicated because obviously the computers that you would normally use to reconfigure that were the same ones that were you know, quote unquote disappeared from the Internet. So it was a pretty rough day for Facebook. Now, this was just part of the drama that Facebook is currently going through. On Sunday this past Sunday, former Facebook employee Francis Howgan appeared on Sixty Minutes and it turns out that Francis is the person who leaked internal research documents to the Wall Street Journal. You know, the studies that showed that Facebook researchers were concerned that Instagram was harmful to mental health, particularly for teenage girl who girls who were using the service um and that Facebook was well aware of how misinformation was spreading across the platform and how the algorithm was elevating misinformation campaigns. On the interview, she alleged that Facebook, when faced with a decision to either go for making a profit or go with an option that would be better for users, would always choose the profit option every single time. Today, she has scheduled to appear before the United States Senate to answer questions about her former employer, And of course we have been having ongoing conversations within the government, the US government and the European government as well about whether or not Facebook represents a monopoly and if perhaps it might be a good idea to, you know, force the company to divest itself of properties like Instagram and WhatsApp. Now, I've also seen some people suggest that somehow the outage yesterday was linked to the hearing that's happening today and and the sixty minutes expose that had happened on Sunday, that perhaps someone over at Facebook was trying to hide something and just took extreme measures. But that doesn't seem like that doesn't seem to hold up even under casual screw utiny. I would argue that the outage hurt the company big time, and at the worst possible moment for Facebook, for one thing, because Facebook went down and all these various integrated services then became unavailable. The people who say Facebook has too much influence have way more ammunition, right, because millions of people rely on, say, WhatsApp to stay in touch with family and friends around the world, including vulnerable populations who use WhatsApp in order to maintain contact with people, like say, back in Africa or in South America. But because WhatsApp runs on Facebook's systems, that whole service became unavailable globally for like six hours. This, the critics argue, is what happens when we put all of our digital eggs in one social media platforms basket. Right, If we have our logins tied to Facebook, If the service as we rely upon to stay in touch with everybody are part of Facebook and Facebook goes down, all of that becomes unavailable to us. That, as the argument goes, is an argument against this kind of consolidation that we've been seeing with platforms like Facebook, where you know, they're not just building out their own tools, they're buying up tools that overlap what Facebook already does. A lot of people have pointed out over the years that Facebook has acquired companies when it became clear that Facebook itself was not going to be able to compete against those companies, and those companies potentially stood as a threat when it comes to getting people to spend more and more time on Facebook. Now, beyond those pieces of evidence that suggests that this is not something that the company would have wanted Bloomberg estimated that the outage and the dip and Facebook's stock price, which has been going on since, you know, earlier in September. UH, that also meant that CEO Mark Zuckerberg saw his wealth decreased by around seven billion dollars. Now that is beyond a princely some obviously, and that's not to say that he won't regain that wealth now that Facebook is back up and running. Maybe he will. Maybe the company's UH stock prices will improve, although with the hearing in front of the U. S. Senate that's not certain. I would argue no one would authorize some sort of extreme pull the plug UH strategy at the cost of seven billion bucks. I'm pretty confident this was all coincidental. It was a miss configuration, It was not done on purpose, and it was just supremely bad timing for Facebook for all this to happen at once. Will the U. S. Government force Facebook to say bye bye to Instagram and WhatsApp? I honestly don't know. There is precedent. We have seen the government break up big company years before, but it hasn't happened in a long time, and I'm not sure that it will happen in this case. However, I figure there's never been a time with more obvious support for that argument than right now. Yesterday really brought that into, you know, into the light. Last week, I reported that Amazon would hold a hardware reveal event, but that my recording session happened before the event occurred, so I couldn't actually say what they were going to show off. I did mention that the Verge had predicted a wall mounted echo device, and we got one. It's called the Echo Show. But that site also predicted we wouldn't see anything about the robot that Amazon had had in development for a few years at that point. However, Amazon surprised us all and in fact brought out a robot that it now calls Astro. The robot will initially sell to a limited customer base by invitation only, so you actually have to request and invite, and you must hand over the princely sum of nine dollars to buy it. Later on, that price is actually going to go up to around one tho. The robot has a tablet like screen for a face, like it's got these digital eyes. Essentially kind of looks a little bit like Wally from the Pixar film. It moves around on two twelve inch wheels, and it's got a little castor like wheel in the back to provide more stability. It's got cameras, including a five megapixel camera built into the screen, but it's also got a periscope camera it can extend and use to look around at surroundings. It's got a speaker, it's got a microphone. It has facial recognition technology built into it. It can learn a map of your home, so you can have it learned the layout of your home and assigned specific names to specific rooms. Thus, you could tell your robot, hey, you know, go to the kitchen and it would navigate over to the chin from wherever it happened to be. Um. It's got all the Alexa capabilities built into it so that it can respond to the request that you would typically use to ask Alexa for stuff like what the weather is, or to play a certain song and all that kind of stuff. Not everyone is sold on this robot. The m I T Technology Review has called the robot stupid. The Verge ran a follow up piece saying that developers who had worked on the robot had reportedly called it terrible and claimed it would make dumb mistakes such as throwing itself off the stairs, So if you have stairs in your home, you might not want to have this thing on an upper level. I think I would advise folks to maybe pump the brakes a bit before shelling out a grand or more for this thing. While we have stuff like room Buzz and those are reasonably popular, we're really still waiting on the household robot that is a must buy. I've seen a lot of people suggest that this robot doesn't do a whole really when you get down to it, and the stuff that it does do, it doesn't necessarily do super well, so it's not like a wise purchasing decision. Um. I mean, it would potentially give Amazon a lot more opportunities to figure out how to sell stuff to you. I mean, if they've got essentially a computer that can move around your house and observe stuff, then you could argue this could just be another way for Amazon to position itself in order to sell more products to customers. And frankly, I suspect that that is a large part of it. And you you have to pay for that privilege, right, You have to pay like a thousand dollars or more in order to have the privilege of having a surveillance device that is potentially giving more information to a company to sell you more stuff. Anyway. Besides the robot and the wall mounted Echo Show, which again is like a smart display that you can attach to a wall, we also saw the Echo Glow. This is a table top tablet for video conferencing for kids, and it's meant to appeal to children so that they video conference with distant friends and family and they don't get bored and just wander off. That was what Amazon said. The purpose was behind the design. So in this case, the tablet actually has incorporated inside of it a projector. The projector can display stuff on the tabletop in front of the tablet. It even comes with like a white mat. It's kind of like a movie screen, so you lay the mat down, you put the tablet behind the mat, and it can project a screen down on the mat that's on the table. Uh that can become an interactive story book, you can become a game. And there are infrared sensors inside the tablet so it can track things like hand motion, so when you're you know, moving stuff around on this screen, it's acting almost like a touch screen. It's kind of a neat idea. I'm not entirely sold on it, but then I also don't have any kids, so um. Amazon also revealed a smart thermostat fitness track your devices, and also a version of its Echo device specifically designed for Disney properties. So in the future, should you stay at like a Walt Disney World resort, you might find that there is a Disney themed Echo and you can use it to ask questions like checking on dining reservations or asking about park hours, that kind of stuff. Um, I was not super impressed with the Amazon presentation, but then I also don't want this to be an Amazon ad. So we're just gonna go to break and listen to other ads and then come back with some more news and we're back. Researchers at Trendy College in Dublin, Ireland, which by the way, is one of my favorite spots in Ireland, have released a research paper that looked into how much data iOS and Android devices gather from their respective users. The paper says that both operating systems send packets of data back to you know, their their respective h q s approximately every four and a half minutes. Whether you're using it or not. This happens even if you've gone to the trouble of setting all data sharing options to off. Keep in mind, some data sharing isn't optional, it's mandatory. And the study did find some differences between the two. Google, they said, collects much larger volumes of data. The size of packets that Google sending back is much greater than what Apple is doing. However, Apple, while sending less data, overall, sent a wider variety of data, including data about other devices that are connected to whichever network you connect to. Android doesn't do that, so Apple is interested in what other devices are on the same network you're on. I guess. The Google reps have said this is really just kind of how smartphones work. They compared it to how modern day vehicles have components that send data back to car companies for safety purposes. The researchers said that if users really want to limit how much of your data your phone collects and shares, you should really go with an Android phone because despite the fact that it's sending more data, you have more options. You can have network connections disabled when you activate your phone, and you should also disabled Google Play and YouTube, and the Google Play Store. That cuts down on most of the data collection. You would still need to sideload apps and get them from someplace other than the Google Play Store in order to avoid that data collection. Even then, you're just minimizing the amount of data that's being collected and shared. They did say that Apple users are just out of lock because Apple requires a network connection to activate an iPhone. So Apple users are subjected to data collection no matter what they do. Speaking of Apple, the Wall Street Journal parts that Apple made more operating profit from games than Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and Activision Blizzard combined. And Apple doesn't make games, but profited more from games than all those other companies. Al Right, so in some ways this actually is not a big surprise, right. I Mean we're talking operating profit, we're not talking revenue. So companies like Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony, and Activision Blizzard they actually make games. Now that means that there are costs associated with that business. You know, Profit is what you've got after you've accounted for the costs of producing whatever it is you're producing. So if I decide I'm going to go and make a chair, and I sell that chair for fifty dollars, but it turns out the materials cost me sixty dollars. Well, I lost money on that, right, I didn't make a profit. That's a loss. While Apple generates revenue by taking a cut of all digital sales up to in some cases, so Apple gets a slice of the pie, which is I guess, Apple pie. Every time someone purchases a game from the Apple App Store, or and this is really important, they get a slice of the pie if a person makes an in game purchase on an app that was taken from the Apple App Store. Apple has been going through a series of court cases about those in game purchases, having recently been ordered by a judge to offer alternatives or allow for alternatives to Apple's own in app purchasing system. This would give users the option to go with something else and not go through Apple. This is at the heart of the matter between Apple and Epic Games, the creator of Fortnite. So again, yes, Apple has made more profiting games than official game companies, but then Apple also doesn't have to have the expense of development for those. A man named O N. D As, a former elevator operator at Tesla, sued the company, charging that Tesla is a hostile work environment, and that he and other employees were the targets for things like racial slurs and intimidation. A court found in his favor, and the court has awarded him some one seven million dollars or so in damages. Now, one thing that makes this story really important is the fact that Diaz was even able to sue at all. Tesla, like a lot of tech companies, has a policy that requires employees to sign an arbitration agreement. Now, these agreements say that employees must work within company systems to resolve problems. They are not allowed to go outside the company and say, address the media or sue the company in a court and take it to a public trial. However, Diaz never signed that kind of an agreement, so he wasn't held to those restrictions. He could sue without breaking an agreement he had made with the company. And you might even say, hah, kind of sounds to me like these sorts of agreements would allow for a toxic work environment to flourish, and that there would be no real way you could address it because all the disputes have to be handled internally, and if the system is rotten, then you'll never come out on top because the game is stacked against you from the beginning. You would not be the only person to think that way. In fact, one of one of the the investors of Tesla, an organization called NIA Impact Capital Um, has sent uh the board of directors a request to review this arbitration policy, raising concerns that the policy enables harassment. Now, I would go even further than that. I would say it encourages harassment. Also, I mean, is it just me or do you sense that there's like a growing labor movement in the United States? You know, I think we're still in the very early stages and it could just fizzle out. But I also feel like younger generations in particular are getting a bit more head up about the status quo, and they're demanding things change or they won't play ball. And hey, young folks, I am with you on this one. You know, I might not understand your squid games and your TikTok's, but I'm all for overhauling the labor system. Also, here's hoping Tesla cracks down on those internal problems and really does try to change that toxic work environment. It would be really nice to hear about companies actually making substantial transformational changes in workplaces and find a place where employees are all treated with respect and dignity, which I know that's crazy talk, but it would be a nice change of pace from the stories we constantly get about companies that have terrible work environments, really demoralized employees, and just it just sounds like the worst. So I am hoping that Tesla makes those changes. Also, I hope that we start to see more resistance to this trend of arbitration agreements being put in place. It's just a way for companies to protect themselves at the expense of their employees. And I don't think that's I don't when we're talking about protection, I don't think it's the companies that need to be protected. I think it's the individual employees who need the protection. Again, that's my own opinion. Sticking with cars, since we just talked about Tesla, let's chat a bit about California because it's that state's Department of Motor Vehicles that just granted permits to a pair of self driving car companies, that being Way Moo and Cruise. They both have been given permits to operate light duty self driving taxi cabs in San Francisco and in way most case beyond. But these permits do come with some restrictions. However, they're not open ended. So in cruises case, that company's cabs will only be able to operate between ten pm and six am, so they can only operate it overnight. They are allowed a maximum speed of thirty miles per hour, and they can't operate during particularly foggy or rainy conditions. I actually find that ten pm to six am really odd. I mean, maybe it's to avoid traffic. Um. I was trying to find more confirmation on this and make sure that it wasn't just a transcription error and that they didn't they didn't mean between six am and ten pm, but rather ten pm and six am. I I don't know, so I'm just going with what the press release said. So, since we're talking San Francisco, and this does limit when the vehicles can operate and they can't operate in bad weather, it really does restrict when they would be able to two autonomously drive the streets of San Francisco. WAYMO, which is part of Alphabet that's the company that's also apparent to Google, gets a bit more leeway the way MOO cars will be authorized to travel up to sixty five miles per hour, so they could go on too highways. They can go beyond just San Francisco, but not the entire state. Uh. They don't appear to have a limitation on when they are allowed to operate, so we don't have like restricted hours for waymo as far as I can suss out. They also are not allowed to drive if the weather is too nasty, so that restriction does still apply. But does this actually mean that robo taxis are right now prowling the streets of San Francisco. Not quite yet, because the companies will still need to get approval from California's Public Utilities Commission, and that commission might have more restrictions or more requirements. Uh, so we'll have to just keep an eye out for it. Last week, the website Lyons posted an essay written primarily by Alexandra Abrams, who used to be the head of Blue Origins employee Communications. Blue Origin, in case you don't recall, is Amazon founder Jeff Bezos's space industry company anyway, Abrams, in around twenty other folks who either work or have worked for Blue Origin, detailed that the company has a truly toxic work culture seems to be a common theme. The essay alleges that numerous male senior leaders have acted inappropriately with women, including one who CEO Bob Smith, would then appoint as part of a hiring committee for a senior HR position. Now, in case that didn't quite register with you, I'll put it in in another way, a guy who had numerous sexual harassment claims against him was then put on a committee in charge of finding a human resources executive. That's like giving an inmate in solitary confinement the authority to choose who the warden is for the prison. The essay lists several incidents and examples and makes the case that Blue Origins work environment is harmful, and it's harmful to productivity, it's harmful to mental health and Abrahams also said that many of the authors of the essay would never go up on a Blue Origin rocket out of concerns for safety, because they said that the work conditions were so intense and so rushed that they feel that safety has been uh neglected too much. Meanwhile, Blue Origin has announced that William Shatner is scheduled to go up on the next trip, so they're going with all systems go. I guess Today representatives from Microsoft, Google, and Amazon will be meeting with the US government's Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House to talk about quantum computing. Now, for those who are not familiar with that term, quantum computing involves the strange world of quantum mechanics. So your classic computers operate by processing information in the form of binary digits or bits, and a bit can be a zero or a one. It's kind of like a light switch. It's either off or it's on. But quantum computers use what we call cubits or quantum bits. Now, these can be a zero, a one, anything in between, and all of them at the same time. Quantum computing get involve strange stuff like superposition. That it's what we were just talking about. Superposition is where you have a quantum element that can occupy all possible states simultaneously. It would be like if you could be awake in a sleep at the same time. You know, those are two different states. That's kind of what superposition is, but it only applies to the quantum world, alright, So anyone who's trying to sell you anything about superposition that could be observed in our classical universe, they're full of it. That is not the way the world works. Quantum computers can also involve entanglement. Now, this is where you have the state of one quantum element tied to the state of another, no matter how far apart those two quantum elements are, and by observing one of those two you can tell what the state of the other one was at that exact moment. So let's talk about electron spin. This is a pretty common one. Let's say that you've got two entangled electrons. One of them is spinning up and the other one spinning down. And let's say that they're a universe apart. It doesn't matter as long as they're tied together. So while one spinning up, the other one spinning down, you observe the one of them. You see that spinning up, You know the other one was spinning down. However, the crazy thing about the quantum world is that when you start to observe things, you actually change their behavior, and things like entanglement breakdown. So while you might be able to say at that specific moment that other electron was spinning down, you don't know what it's doing now because the entanglement has been severed. Now quantum computers can solve a subset of computational problems with insane speed, assuming that the quantum computer has enough cubits to do it, and that you have developed an algorithm that can tackle that sort of problem. And these are computational problems that would take classic computers hundreds or thousands or millions of years to complete, and you can do it relatively quickly with a quantum computer. Now, it doesn't apply for all types of computational problems. So in other words, you wouldn't want to use a quantum computer to play call of duty because it wouldn't work nearly as well as a classic computer would. Anyway, the experts from Microsoft and Amazon and Google are meeting today to talk about possible future applications of quantum computing, some of which relate to security. Encryption is one of those things that quantum computers could really disrupt, because with a sufficiently powerful quantum computer and the right algorithm, you could potentially break even the toughest encryption schemes in a very little amount of time. It's amazing and also kind of scary. We have a couple more stories to get to But before we do that, let's take another quick break. So, in the continuing battle against robo calls, the United States Federal Communications Commission or FCC is considering new restrictions on domestic gateway providers and they would have to follow these new rules to cut back on robocalls that originate outside the United States. All right, this gets to how do you deal with a problem that doesn't necessarily originate inside your own country? Right? We see this with the Internet, and we see it with the telephone system because the FCC doesn't have jurisdiction outside the United States, right Like, they can't, you know, the f c C can't go to a German telephone company and say, hey, knock it off, because the FCC has no authority over telecommunications companies that are outside the United States, and yet illegal robocalls from other nations are a real problem. So the FCC's proposal is to require gateway phone companies. These are US based companies that accept and facilitate calls that are coming from outside the country and routing them to the correct you know, phone line in inside the country. They will be required to verify the accuracy of color I D and to authenticate that a call is legitimate, or presumably they would have to block it. The FCC has already created protocols called Stir and Shaken, which are meant to crack down on US based robo calls. And here's hoping that these proposals become actual rules and that we see a dramatic decrease in robo calls as a result. I don't know about any of you, but for me, I answer maybe one call out of twenty that comes to my phone because the vast majority of calls I get our numbers, I don't recognize. Most of them never bother to leave a message once it goes to voicemail. The ones that do, it's prerecorded nonsense. That doesn't you know, it's nothing important. It's like you need to renew this warranty that I don't have on often on something that I don't own, so it's not not something that I really want. And it would be really nice if you know, when my phone rings, I could be reasonably sure that it's from someone I know and possibly someone I want to talk to, or maybe like I know, oh, that call is coming from you know, the power company, and they're letting me know about maybe a planned outage in order to do some work in the neighborhood. Those are the kind of calls where, yeah, I'd kind of like to be able to get them, but I don't get anything because I just let them all go to voicemail because there are too many robocalls. All right, I know, you know this is a problem. If you have a phone, you're aware of it. I'll be quiet now. Finally, the activist group Anonymous, which honestly I kind of lost tabs on for a while. They I'm not sure if they went quiet or if I just stopped, you know, hearing about their exploits. Anyway. UH, some group that's associated with Anonymous has been actively defacing a Chinese government website that promotes tourism in China. The group has repeatedly altered that website, adding in images, a lot of them images of various leaders that the Chinese government has vilified, and UH also sending in messages that call for people who visit the website to reject communism and authoritarianism. I'm not sure how effective those strategies are when you're targeting a tourism page, but it does show how Anonymous will use a combination of subversion and you know, kind of juvenile memes to poke at a target. The group says it discovered that the server hosting the site was using default password credentials. That speaks really poorly of that website's approach to security. As a rule, you should always change the default password settings on all your network devices, otherwise you run the risk of someone using the default password credentials to access your stuff and mess with it. I don't have to guess your password if you've never changed it. If I try to log into your router and I use admin and password as the credentials and it gets in, that's really on you because you didn't take the steps to I mean it's on me too, I'm the jerk who's trying to access your system, but it's on you for also for not taking the steps to change those defaults. So changing defaults is really good Anonymous in case you're not familiar with them. It's a very loose organization, actually using the word organization as even a little grandiose. It's a collective of hackers and activists who will target various companies and individuals for different reasons. Sometimes it's to fight against what is seen as authoritarian regimes. Sometimes it's to fight against companies that are seen to be hypocritical. Uh, it really just depends, and there's no centralized leadership. Really. You can have people who sort of take the lead on specific initiatives, but it's a very loose collective at which works to the group's both benefit and detriment. It all depends on what anyone's trying to do. All right, that's it for the tech News for Tuesday, October one. Will be back later in the week with more tech News and more episodes of tech Stuff. If you have any suggestions for topics I should cover on the show, reach out to me on Twitter. The handle is text stuff h s W and I'll 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.