Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey thereon Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and How the Tech are You. It's time for the tech news for December nineteenth, twenty twenty three, and first up. Elon Musk has had a pretty rocky twenty twenty three in general, I think it's safe to say, and these last few months have been particularly challenging. I will add that in my own opinion, I feel like this is a rocky road that Elon Musk himself has paved. Anyway. The latest of those challenges is that the European Commission announced an investigation into x, the social platform formally known as Twitter. This has to do with the new Digital Services Act in the EU, which came into effect this past August. This law sets out rules regarding stuff like disinformation, transparent advertising, and illegal content on the Internet. So the goal was really to bring the member states of the EU, all of which have their own local sets of laws on these matters, closer into alignment to have a sort of universal set of rules for the whole of the EU. For my fellow American listeners think of it as the difference between, say, a federal law regarding a specific matter, and a state law similar to that. Anyway, the commissioners say that it appears X has not been compliant with this new law, and that the platform has failed to do any significant work to prevent or respond to illegal content and disinformation posted to it. In particular, the focus is on information in the wake of the conflict between Israel and Hamas. On top of that, the commission argues that X has made use of a quote suspected deceptive design of user interface in the quote, and you might think, well, what the heck do they mean by that? Well, Lisa O'Carroll of The Guardian has an explanation. It's due to how X markets and operates the blue check mark system. Now I'll remind you that back in the Twitter days, a blue check mark was a verification mark, right. It was meant to verify that an account belonged to the person it claimed to represent. So that way, if you saw a celebrities account and there was a blue check mark next to it, you could be assured that indeed the celebrity, or more likely the celebrities PR team owns that account, but now a blue check mark merely indicates someone who has paid to have the blue check mark, which comes with a few little actual benefits in addition to having the blue check mark appear next to your name. The investigation is in the earliest stages and there is a lot to cover, Like they're wondering if does the blue check mark actually mislead people into thinking that somehow an account that has a blue check mark is more reliable than one that doesn't. So there's a lot more that has to go on. It's just a preliminary investigation at this point, and I am sure this comes as unwelcome news to mister Musk. If the EU determines that X has violated the Digital Services Act, the consequences can be pretty severe. Punishments can include a fine of up to six percent of the company's annual turnover. That's a UK term that essentially means gross revenue, So before you take all your expenses out, it's how much money you made before you had to deduct expenses For X. That would be pretty awful, as the company has already had massive drops in revenue as it is. They could even potentially block X from operating within the EU. So this is a big deal and we'll have to see how this story unfolds. If the recent past is anything to go by, it will probably not go well for x unlast elon Musk's asides to remove himself from that situation entirely, which I don't see happening, but I think that's really the only way out for the platform. Next up. Comcast has now confirmed has been the target of a data breach, potentially affecting nearly thirty six million customers. Tech crunches Carly Page has a piece on this. It's titled Comcast says hackers stole data of close to thirty six million Infinity customers. So the issue appears to be related to a weakness in enterprise hardware, namely some networking devices made by a company called Citrix. So Comcast uses Citrix devices in its own network, and hackers discovered a vulnerability in certain Citrix gear last summer. Citrix responded by creating and then making available some security patches, but not everyone was right on top of the ball there and didn't implement the security patches fast enough, including apparently Comcasts, so that gave hackers the chance to exploit the vulnerability in Comcasts systems this past October and access customer data, and we're just hearing about it now, right, Like Comcasts found out about about a month later and now we're hearing about it. So what kind of data was accessed? Comcast hasn't fully explained that yet. Apparently they're still investigating it, but they said that at least for some customers, it includes a lot like their name, their username, a hashed version of their password, so in other words, sort of an encrypted version, no telling how strong the encryption is. The customer's address, their other contact informations like email, phone number that sort of stuff, their data birth, the last four digits of their Social Security number, and any security questions and answers they may have provided, you know, the stuff like what was the street you grew up on? Kind of questions. Comcast has been reaching out the customers and require them to do a password reset, while also recommending that they enable two factor authentication. This is where I recommend to all of y'all that you use multi factor authentication whenever it is available. Multi factor authentication does not guarantee that you're absolutely safe from attacks, but it does raise the bar enough so that I would say most attackers won't bother putting forth the effort to get past it. Now I did say most, not all. So there is no such thing as a perfectly safe system. But you can at least improve your security and thus eliminate like ninety eight percent of the potential attacks you could face, and I think that is a worthwhile effort. If you're in the United States and you are a last minute shopper type and the holidays are right here upon us, maybe you were planning on getting someone an Apple Watch, specifically a Series nine or an Ultra to Apple Watch, you better hop to it, because once three PM rolls around on the twenty first, which is this Thursday, those watches will be off store shelves in the US. And that's because Apple is facing a ban by the International Trade Center or ITC all because of a little sensor that's present in those two models of the Apple Watch. So a company called Massimo, which makes medical devices, is in a patent dispute with Apple over a sensor called an SPO two sensor. It's designed to measure the blood oxygen models. So Massimo or Masimo, I don't know how you say the name of the company. Essentially, they're saying Apple infringed upon a patented technology. It's an allegation that Apple veheminently denies. But in the face of this ITC ban, Apple is preemptively making the move to pull all Series nine and Ultra two models off the shelves for the time being. Within the US, the matter is up for review. President Biden will actually have the authority to either veto or allow the ban to continue. If he does not veto the ban, Apple can still actually appeal that decision in federal courts, but it would mean that the tech would be off limits for US customers, at least within the United States. I mean you could technically travel somewhere else and buy one of these, I guess. According to Victoria Song of The Verge, Apple is also working on a software solution that, if approved by the ITC, could serve as a workaround for the issue, so there wouldn't have to be any changes to the hardware and Apple could continue to sell them in stores in the United States. So I'll have to see what happens with this. Google has agreed to a settlement with the US States, as in all fifty United States states in a massive anti trust lawsuit. So this lawsuit focused on Google's Play Store, the Android App Store essentially, and the United States was accusing Google of operating an anti competitive platform by controlling the stuff like app distribution and Android device is and forcing app developers to pay fees for in app transactions. Right like Google would take a cut of all in app transactions. That's something that Apple has also faced in courts in the United States recently. So if a judge approves this settlement, because it has not been approved as of the time I'm recording this, Google will have to pay seven hundred million dollars and says it will introduce greater competition in the play app Store to boot. Of that seven hundred million, seventy million would go to a fund that the US States would divvy up. The other six hundred and thirty million would go to a fund that would pay out to Google consumers. In the process of the settlement, Google admits no wrongdoing, which is often a case with court settlements. Now, this is just the latest news in an ongoing year of scrutiny on Google from various regulators. So I think we're going to have a lot more stories about various governmental organizations applying pressure to Google next year. But you'll have to listen to my Predictions episode that'll be coming up in a little more than a week and a half to learn more about that. Yep, it's coming back. Speaking of coming back, we'll be back to after we take this quick break to thank our sponsors. We're back. Sean Lenas of CNN has a story about how Microsoft believes operatives from China are making use of generative AI in an effort to mislead US voters. So the images are meant to sow discord among voters and to push the divide that already exists between the left and the right to even greater extremes. Really, it's about making extremists, and y'all, we do not need outside help to do that. We're really good at it ourselves. But admittedly, if you put your thumb on the scale, it does speed things up considerably. So this campaign appears to largely center on creating kind of iconic images through AI, and these images are meant to highlight specific issues in the United States to a degree that I would actually call absurd. I looked at some of these images and I'm thinking this feels like it's parody or satire, right, it's so over the top. However, according to at least some folks over in Microsoft, the efforts are proving to be effective because they are driving engagement online at least on certain platforms. According to lin Gas, other companies have reported a rise in Chinese backed misinformation campaigns as well, where they've actually taken action to take down these campaigns, and some of them at least appear to not be particularly effective, but they are happening. So it's a reminder to not accept everything you encounter online, specifically on social networking sites, at face value. Rob Stump of Inside Evs has an article titled Volkswagen will bring back physical buttons in new cars and Yeah, that pretty much gives away right. The title says that the company has decided to walk back recent design changes in their electric vehicle line, and those design changes saw a lot of touchscreen interfaces and haptic capacitive buttons replace physical buttons that were on things like control panels and steering wheels. So Volkswagen had really kind of made this declaration that they were going to go buttonless, but it turns out that the customers, the drivers, send a very clear message to the company saying don't do that. Customers reported that the touchscreen interfaces and those haptic capacitive surfaces on the steering wheel were distracting and frustrating and potentially even dangerous to use. As such, the company has started to revise the design on the ID two electric vehicle, which reintroduces some but not all, of the physical control buttons. The whole Brewjaja prompted Volkswagen CEO to say the design change to touch interfaces quote did a lot of damage end quote to the brand. Now keep in mind, Volkswagen is the same brand that was behind the diesel Gate scandal years ago. I mean, arguably that company is still trying to recover from that brew ha, So it knows a lot about damaging itself. Yeah, and this story mostly is focused in Europe, like that's where a lot of these vehicles have been released and the objection to them has followed. I will personally say, I'm not a driver, so it's not like I have any real expertise in this area, but I do find an off putting to be in a vehicle where everything is like a touch based interface because it requires to me at least to spend more time looking at the interface to figure out what I need to do in order to achieve the outcome I want. And if I were a driver, that would mean my attention would be off the road, and that I think is pretty darn dangerous. I was gonna say reckless, but ironically that seems like that would be the wrong word to use. Anyway, Volkswagen has said, you know what are bad, We'll go back to buttons, so we'll see how those look in future models. Speaking of cars, this week, Canada is likely to announce that all new cars will need to be zero emissions vehicles by the year twenty thirty five. And by that I mean actually, some Canadian governmental agency will issue a statement, not that Canada itself will suddenly gain sentience and begin to speak Anyway, The point is it seems like Canada is following in the footsteps of several other countries around the world that are also setting requirements on new vehicles to be as carbon free as far as emissions go within a little more than a decade. This doesn't cover used vehicles. Obviously, you could still have an internal combustion engine vehicle in Canada. It's not like they're being outlawed, just that any new vehicle from twenty thirty five on has to be emissions free. I find it somewhat amazing that I could well live to see gas stations become largely obsolete, like get such an It's such an integrated thing in my life I think of, Like I have childhood memories of going to gas stations and stuff. It is wild to me to think that within ten fifteen years those could pretty much become, you know, completely converted over into like charging stations and stuff. It just is odd. I don't know. Maybe it's just because I'm old. And in Space News, NASA demonstrated the enormous power of the Deep Space Optical Communications project or DSOC by beaming an ultra high definition video from space to Earth using laser beams. And I know what you're thinking, a video of what? What did NASA's video contain? Well, maybe you didn't ask that question, you probably can guess. I mean it's a digital video. Yes, it was of a cat, because some memes just won't go away. Now, this particular cat is Tater's, an orange tabby, and the video shows Taters joyfully chasing a little laserbeam dot around an environment, and the transmitter is a board of spacecraft called Psyche. That spacecraft is nearly nineteen million miles away from us, but you'll be relieved to hear that little Taters has his pause firmly on the ground. Taters did not go on a ride helped to space. What they did was they shot the video, or actually they took a video and downloaded it and then they saved it to Psyche. Spacecraft's hard drive essentially sent the spacecraft out into space, and then it beamed the video back to us at a speed that was incredible, faster than broadband speeds here on the ground. It took a less than two minutes for the message to travel those nineteen million miles. It actually they said it took less time for the spacecraft to beam the video down to Earth than it took for them to transmit the video from the receiver station to the headquarters, which is pretty amazing. The experiment really helps pave the way for long distance transmissions in space. That's something that's going to be a key component in missions to places like Mars or beyond. If we want to set up really good colonies on places like Mars or the Moon. Using this kind of laser communication technology will be key to bringing down the delay times as much as possible and being able to communicate seamlessly or as close to it as we can. Okay, I've got just one article recommendation for you all today. TJ. Thompson and Daniel Angus wrote a piece for The Conversation, although so I actually found it on tech Explore and the piece is titled data Poisoning. How artists are sabotaging AI to take revenge on image generators. And I've talked about data poisoning before on this show, but it's a good article to get a grounding in what's going on. As you probably know, a lot of artists are upset that AI companies have been using artists' works to train up generative AI, but they haven't gotten the artist's consent to do that. So it's sort of like if you found out someone was using your work to train your replacement without ever telling you, Like they might be saying, hey, you're putting in great work, and they really mean it, because they mean your great work is training up the person who's going to take over your job. Anyway, as this piece explains some artists are experimenting with ways to trip up AI so that it produces really poor output, so check it out. And that's it for this episode of tech Stuff. I'll have one two other tech news episodes before we close out the year. I've also got a bunch of special episodes kind of looking back over some of the big tech stories of twenty twenty three, so check those out. And they'll even be special ones publishing on weekends so you can check those out too. And yeah, thanks to all of you, Thanks to the amazing production staff who have stepped up to help me out during the holiday season. I really appreciate it, including super producer Tari. I hope you are enjoying your holiday and to all of you out there, I wish you happiness and health and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey thereon Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and How the Tech are You. It's time for the tech news for December nineteenth, twenty twenty three, and first up. Elon Musk has had a pretty rocky twenty twenty three in general, I think it's safe to say, and these last few months have been particularly challenging. I will add that in my own opinion, I feel like this is a rocky road that Elon Musk himself has paved. Anyway. The latest of those challenges is that the European Commission announced an investigation into x, the social platform formally known as Twitter. This has to do with the new Digital Services Act in the EU, which came into effect this past August. This law sets out rules regarding stuff like disinformation, transparent advertising, and illegal content on the Internet. So the goal was really to bring the member states of the EU, all of which have their own local sets of laws on these matters, closer into alignment to have a sort of universal set of rules for the whole of the EU. For my fellow American listeners think of it as the difference between, say, a federal law regarding a specific matter, and a state law similar to that. Anyway, the commissioners say that it appears X has not been compliant with this new law, and that the platform has failed to do any significant work to prevent or respond to illegal content and disinformation posted to it. In particular, the focus is on information in the wake of the conflict between Israel and Hamas. On top of that, the commission argues that X has made use of a quote suspected deceptive design of user interface in the quote, and you might think, well, what the heck do they mean by that? Well, Lisa O'Carroll of The Guardian has an explanation. It's due to how X markets and operates the blue check mark system. Now I'll remind you that back in the Twitter days, a blue check mark was a verification mark, right. It was meant to verify that an account belonged to the person it claimed to represent. So that way, if you saw a celebrities account and there was a blue check mark next to it, you could be assured that indeed the celebrity, or more likely the celebrities PR team owns that account, but now a blue check mark merely indicates someone who has paid to have the blue check mark, which comes with a few little actual benefits in addition to having the blue check mark appear next to your name. The investigation is in the earliest stages and there is a lot to cover, Like they're wondering if does the blue check mark actually mislead people into thinking that somehow an account that has a blue check mark is more reliable than one that doesn't. So there's a lot more that has to go on. It's just a preliminary investigation at this point, and I am sure this comes as unwelcome news to mister Musk. If the EU determines that X has violated the Digital Services Act, the consequences can be pretty severe. Punishments can include a fine of up to six percent of the company's annual turnover. That's a UK term that essentially means gross revenue, So before you take all your expenses out, it's how much money you made before you had to deduct expenses For X. That would be pretty awful, as the company has already had massive drops in revenue as it is. They could even potentially block X from operating within the EU. So this is a big deal and we'll have to see how this story unfolds. If the recent past is anything to go by, it will probably not go well for x unlast elon Musk's asides to remove himself from that situation entirely, which I don't see happening, but I think that's really the only way out for the platform. Next up. Comcast has now confirmed has been the target of a data breach, potentially affecting nearly thirty six million customers. Tech crunches Carly Page has a piece on this. It's titled Comcast says hackers stole data of close to thirty six million Infinity customers. So the issue appears to be related to a weakness in enterprise hardware, namely some networking devices made by a company called Citrix. So Comcast uses Citrix devices in its own network, and hackers discovered a vulnerability in certain Citrix gear last summer. Citrix responded by creating and then making available some security patches, but not everyone was right on top of the ball there and didn't implement the security patches fast enough, including apparently Comcasts, so that gave hackers the chance to exploit the vulnerability in Comcasts systems this past October and access customer data, and we're just hearing about it now, right, Like Comcasts found out about about a month later and now we're hearing about it. So what kind of data was accessed? Comcast hasn't fully explained that yet. Apparently they're still investigating it, but they said that at least for some customers, it includes a lot like their name, their username, a hashed version of their password, so in other words, sort of an encrypted version, no telling how strong the encryption is. The customer's address, their other contact informations like email, phone number that sort of stuff, their data birth, the last four digits of their Social Security number, and any security questions and answers they may have provided, you know, the stuff like what was the street you grew up on? Kind of questions. Comcast has been reaching out the customers and require them to do a password reset, while also recommending that they enable two factor authentication. This is where I recommend to all of y'all that you use multi factor authentication whenever it is available. Multi factor authentication does not guarantee that you're absolutely safe from attacks, but it does raise the bar enough so that I would say most attackers won't bother putting forth the effort to get past it. Now I did say most, not all. So there is no such thing as a perfectly safe system. But you can at least improve your security and thus eliminate like ninety eight percent of the potential attacks you could face, and I think that is a worthwhile effort. If you're in the United States and you are a last minute shopper type and the holidays are right here upon us, maybe you were planning on getting someone an Apple Watch, specifically a Series nine or an Ultra to Apple Watch, you better hop to it, because once three PM rolls around on the twenty first, which is this Thursday, those watches will be off store shelves in the US. And that's because Apple is facing a ban by the International Trade Center or ITC all because of a little sensor that's present in those two models of the Apple Watch. So a company called Massimo, which makes medical devices, is in a patent dispute with Apple over a sensor called an SPO two sensor. It's designed to measure the blood oxygen models. So Massimo or Masimo, I don't know how you say the name of the company. Essentially, they're saying Apple infringed upon a patented technology. It's an allegation that Apple veheminently denies. But in the face of this ITC ban, Apple is preemptively making the move to pull all Series nine and Ultra two models off the shelves for the time being. Within the US, the matter is up for review. President Biden will actually have the authority to either veto or allow the ban to continue. If he does not veto the ban, Apple can still actually appeal that decision in federal courts, but it would mean that the tech would be off limits for US customers, at least within the United States. I mean you could technically travel somewhere else and buy one of these, I guess. According to Victoria Song of The Verge, Apple is also working on a software solution that, if approved by the ITC, could serve as a workaround for the issue, so there wouldn't have to be any changes to the hardware and Apple could continue to sell them in stores in the United States. So I'll have to see what happens with this. Google has agreed to a settlement with the US States, as in all fifty United States states in a massive anti trust lawsuit. So this lawsuit focused on Google's Play Store, the Android App Store essentially, and the United States was accusing Google of operating an anti competitive platform by controlling the stuff like app distribution and Android device is and forcing app developers to pay fees for in app transactions. Right like Google would take a cut of all in app transactions. That's something that Apple has also faced in courts in the United States recently. So if a judge approves this settlement, because it has not been approved as of the time I'm recording this, Google will have to pay seven hundred million dollars and says it will introduce greater competition in the play app Store to boot. Of that seven hundred million, seventy million would go to a fund that the US States would divvy up. The other six hundred and thirty million would go to a fund that would pay out to Google consumers. In the process of the settlement, Google admits no wrongdoing, which is often a case with court settlements. Now, this is just the latest news in an ongoing year of scrutiny on Google from various regulators. So I think we're going to have a lot more stories about various governmental organizations applying pressure to Google next year. But you'll have to listen to my Predictions episode that'll be coming up in a little more than a week and a half to learn more about that. Yep, it's coming back. Speaking of coming back, we'll be back to after we take this quick break to thank our sponsors. We're back. Sean Lenas of CNN has a story about how Microsoft believes operatives from China are making use of generative AI in an effort to mislead US voters. So the images are meant to sow discord among voters and to push the divide that already exists between the left and the right to even greater extremes. Really, it's about making extremists, and y'all, we do not need outside help to do that. We're really good at it ourselves. But admittedly, if you put your thumb on the scale, it does speed things up considerably. So this campaign appears to largely center on creating kind of iconic images through AI, and these images are meant to highlight specific issues in the United States to a degree that I would actually call absurd. I looked at some of these images and I'm thinking this feels like it's parody or satire, right, it's so over the top. However, according to at least some folks over in Microsoft, the efforts are proving to be effective because they are driving engagement online at least on certain platforms. According to lin Gas, other companies have reported a rise in Chinese backed misinformation campaigns as well, where they've actually taken action to take down these campaigns, and some of them at least appear to not be particularly effective, but they are happening. So it's a reminder to not accept everything you encounter online, specifically on social networking sites, at face value. Rob Stump of Inside Evs has an article titled Volkswagen will bring back physical buttons in new cars and Yeah, that pretty much gives away right. The title says that the company has decided to walk back recent design changes in their electric vehicle line, and those design changes saw a lot of touchscreen interfaces and haptic capacitive buttons replace physical buttons that were on things like control panels and steering wheels. So Volkswagen had really kind of made this declaration that they were going to go buttonless, but it turns out that the customers, the drivers, send a very clear message to the company saying don't do that. Customers reported that the touchscreen interfaces and those haptic capacitive surfaces on the steering wheel were distracting and frustrating and potentially even dangerous to use. As such, the company has started to revise the design on the ID two electric vehicle, which reintroduces some but not all, of the physical control buttons. The whole Brewjaja prompted Volkswagen CEO to say the design change to touch interfaces quote did a lot of damage end quote to the brand. Now keep in mind, Volkswagen is the same brand that was behind the diesel Gate scandal years ago. I mean, arguably that company is still trying to recover from that brew ha, So it knows a lot about damaging itself. Yeah, and this story mostly is focused in Europe, like that's where a lot of these vehicles have been released and the objection to them has followed. I will personally say, I'm not a driver, so it's not like I have any real expertise in this area, but I do find an off putting to be in a vehicle where everything is like a touch based interface because it requires to me at least to spend more time looking at the interface to figure out what I need to do in order to achieve the outcome I want. And if I were a driver, that would mean my attention would be off the road, and that I think is pretty darn dangerous. I was gonna say reckless, but ironically that seems like that would be the wrong word to use. Anyway, Volkswagen has said, you know what are bad, We'll go back to buttons, so we'll see how those look in future models. Speaking of cars, this week, Canada is likely to announce that all new cars will need to be zero emissions vehicles by the year twenty thirty five. And by that I mean actually, some Canadian governmental agency will issue a statement, not that Canada itself will suddenly gain sentience and begin to speak Anyway, The point is it seems like Canada is following in the footsteps of several other countries around the world that are also setting requirements on new vehicles to be as carbon free as far as emissions go within a little more than a decade. This doesn't cover used vehicles. Obviously, you could still have an internal combustion engine vehicle in Canada. It's not like they're being outlawed, just that any new vehicle from twenty thirty five on has to be emissions free. I find it somewhat amazing that I could well live to see gas stations become largely obsolete, like get such an It's such an integrated thing in my life I think of, Like I have childhood memories of going to gas stations and stuff. It is wild to me to think that within ten fifteen years those could pretty much become, you know, completely converted over into like charging stations and stuff. It just is odd. I don't know. Maybe it's just because I'm old. And in Space News, NASA demonstrated the enormous power of the Deep Space Optical Communications project or DSOC by beaming an ultra high definition video from space to Earth using laser beams. And I know what you're thinking, a video of what? What did NASA's video contain? Well, maybe you didn't ask that question, you probably can guess. I mean it's a digital video. Yes, it was of a cat, because some memes just won't go away. Now, this particular cat is Tater's, an orange tabby, and the video shows Taters joyfully chasing a little laserbeam dot around an environment, and the transmitter is a board of spacecraft called Psyche. That spacecraft is nearly nineteen million miles away from us, but you'll be relieved to hear that little Taters has his pause firmly on the ground. Taters did not go on a ride helped to space. What they did was they shot the video, or actually they took a video and downloaded it and then they saved it to Psyche. Spacecraft's hard drive essentially sent the spacecraft out into space, and then it beamed the video back to us at a speed that was incredible, faster than broadband speeds here on the ground. It took a less than two minutes for the message to travel those nineteen million miles. It actually they said it took less time for the spacecraft to beam the video down to Earth than it took for them to transmit the video from the receiver station to the headquarters, which is pretty amazing. The experiment really helps pave the way for long distance transmissions in space. That's something that's going to be a key component in missions to places like Mars or beyond. If we want to set up really good colonies on places like Mars or the Moon. Using this kind of laser communication technology will be key to bringing down the delay times as much as possible and being able to communicate seamlessly or as close to it as we can. Okay, I've got just one article recommendation for you all today. TJ. Thompson and Daniel Angus wrote a piece for The Conversation, although so I actually found it on tech Explore and the piece is titled data Poisoning. How artists are sabotaging AI to take revenge on image generators. And I've talked about data poisoning before on this show, but it's a good article to get a grounding in what's going on. As you probably know, a lot of artists are upset that AI companies have been using artists' works to train up generative AI, but they haven't gotten the artist's consent to do that. So it's sort of like if you found out someone was using your work to train your replacement without ever telling you, Like they might be saying, hey, you're putting in great work, and they really mean it, because they mean your great work is training up the person who's going to take over your job. Anyway, as this piece explains some artists are experimenting with ways to trip up AI so that it produces really poor output, so check it out. And that's it for this episode of tech Stuff. I'll have one two other tech news episodes before we close out the year. I've also got a bunch of special episodes kind of looking back over some of the big tech stories of twenty twenty three, so check those out. And they'll even be special ones publishing on weekends so you can check those out too. And yeah, thanks to all of you, Thanks to the amazing production staff who have stepped up to help me out during the holiday season. I really appreciate it, including super producer Tari. I hope you are enjoying your holiday and to all of you out there, I wish you happiness and health and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.