Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, Welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for November two, twenty twenty three, rapidly running out of days. In twenty twenty three and yesterday, I did an episode about the history of ad blockers, But one thing I didn't really cover in great detail was YouTube and YouTube's battle against ad blocking. Well, the platform has been rolling out an escalating response to users who have been employing ad blockers on YouTube while trying to watch YouTube videos. Gizmoto's Kevin Hurler has a piece on this on Gizmoto titled YouTube's ad blocker crackdown is getting harder to dodge, and he explains that earlier in October, YouTube began to show a pop up notification to ad blocker users, and the notification said that video playback would not work until the user disabled ad block or otherwise whitelisted YouTube. Now, initially, folks could just close out the pop up and continue on their merry way. A little bit later, YouTube beef this up. They then had a little checkbox you had to click on to notify YouTube that you were acknowledging you had been alerted to this policy, that you should not be using ad blockers, that this is against YouTube's terms of service, and then you could go on your merry way. Now, YouTube will just keep that pop up in place, and it'll block all activity. You won't be able to do anything else on YouTube until you actually take the steps to either disable or pause ad blocking entirely, or to whitelist YouTube. Hurler also points out that the Wall Street Journal has tracked YouTube's ad revenue over the last three quarters and that revenue has been on the decline. So we're not saying that YouTube is losing money. It's not that. It's just they're not making as much money as they had previously. It's going down. That's a trend that most companies are not super happy about. YouTube has been pushing for a lot more folks to subscribe to YouTube premium. That's been a campaign that's been going on for several months now, and they have also introduced a lot of new types of ads, including unskippable ads, longer ones too like it used to be that an unskippable ad would last maybe five or ten seconds, but now we have full thirty second unskippable ads on say YouTube TV, for example. And it has also started to remove some of the controls that video creators had when it came to where they would place ads against their content. I remember talking about how some ASMR creators were very upset because at least initially, it looked like they wouldn't have the opportunity to specify that ads should only be pre roll, for example, a not post roll, and that by removing that control, it meant that an ASMR AD or an ASMR video rather might have allowed an intrusive ad play after the video, thus potentially undoing all the work that the ASMR video was intended to do. Well. I suspect we're going to continue to see shifts in strategy from YouTube because they're going to continue to try and find the most lucrative way to make as much money as possible. That's kind of what businesses do. And I'm sure we'll also see new approaches to ad blocking go on as well. And so it goes. David Ingram and kat Tinbarge have a really good piece over at Nbcnews dot Com. It's titled critics renewed Calls for a TikTok band, claiming play has an anti Israel bias. So the journalists walk a pretty tight line in an attempt to be really objective in this piece, and they explain that several politicians are saying that TikTok is spreading propaganda to young people and favoring a pro Palestinian stance over a pro Israeli stance that with regard to the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. But the reporters actually found that if you look at the stats on TikTok in the United States over the last month or so, the period of time covered by the point when Hamas attacked Israel and then Israel's response to that attack, not only are posts with a hashtag such as stand with Palestine not outpacing ones that have the hashtag stand with Israel, but also that those Israel posts are actually outperforming the Palestine ones. So, in other words, the stats seem to directly contradict the claims these politicians are making. They're saying there's this anti Israel bias across TikTok. The reporters are saying, well, based upon what we're seeing at least over the last thirty days or so here in the United States, there doesn't appear to be any indication of bias. In fact, we're seeing a trend toward the opposite if you're looking at those stats. The reporters say that the claims appear to be based mostly on anecdotal evidence, and also by taking sort of a longer view across the entire history of TikTok. Like if you look at all of TikTok's history and you're looking at the trends of you know, stand with say, stand with a Palestine or stand with Israel, then things get a little less clear, right, because you're looking across the entire history of the platform, but not the current events. And we all also know that anecdotal evidence is really useless with TikTok, right because TikTok's algorithm looks at what content you are engaging with on the platform, and then TikTok essentially draws the conclusion of, Oh, this is what this person wants to see, so let me just give them a whole bunch more of that. It reminds me of a routine that Patton Oswalt used to do where he talked about tvo, where he said he used TVO to record a couple of Westerns that he wanted to watch, and then TVO made the conclusion that he just really liked content that had horses in it, and so he got a whole bunch of horse content recorded on his behalf. This is sort of what it's reminding me of, which means that, you know, if you were to go on TikTok and let's say you actually did see a pro Palestinian video and you objected to that video for whatever reason, and maybe you even leave a comment giving your different point of view and what I am sure would be a reasonable and polite way, then TikTok doesn't see that as, Oh, this person ends up disagreeing with this content, I should show other points of view instead, TikTok says, Oh, this user has engaged with this content, I should show them a whole bunch of the same sort of stuff. So to you, the user, it seems like there's just this flood of content presenting just one side of an issue, and you might not see very many, if any, examples of the other side. But that's a very different thing than arguing that the entire platform has a bias. In fact, the reporters even point out that in other nations governments are actually arguing that the opposite is true, that TikTok has a pro Israel and anti Palestinian bias. So there are different governments making opposite conclusions about a supposed bias within TikTok. And I think the truth of the matter is this is really more to do with the sort of brute force approach of TikTok's algorithm. That is probably, in my opinion, what is fueling this, and that you know, I'm not a huge fan of TikTok, right, I do have some concerns about the potential link to China. That is something that I worry about, although I also acknowledge that as far as I can determine, there's not really much evidence to point to actual cases of Chinese officials using TikTok to you know, surveil national security matters or anything like that. But the potential is there, and that's what is I think a little concerning. But I don't really know that it's you know, that this particular argument has much merit. In fact, I think it doesn't have much merit the argument that TikTok has some sort of specific bias when it goes to the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas. I think that in most cases it's either a failing of critical thinking, or perhaps it's someone who's trying to score political points by you bashing against TikTok, or perhaps a combination of the two that's really to blame here. Next up, Scarlett Johansson is the latest famous person in a face off against artificial intelligence. The Verge reports that Johansson's lawyer is taking legal action against a software developer company. That company is called Convert Software or Convert Software. The company creates an app that's called Lisa AI nineties Yearbook an avatar and ran an advertisement about this app, and it included an AI generated copy of Johanson's voice. So it starts off with like a little segment of a behind the scenes thing from her filming of Black Widow, and then you get the a imitation of Johansson giving information about this app. Apparently this was all done without Johanson's knowledge or consent. And while the ad did feature a little bit of text that said the person in the app doesn't have anything to do with the app itself. Her lawyer is saying, that doesn't really cut the mustard, and we are definitely getting into some tricky territory here. As I've talked about before, the laws here in the United States aren't exactly up to date with technological capabilities. There are very few protections in place when it comes to impersonation. Now, there are limits, like if you were to go so far as to impersonate someone in an effort to slander them, for example, that would be something that you could take legal action against because it goes under slander. Or if you were to impersonate someone and have that person apparently endorse a product, not just voice an ad, but to actually say that they had used and approved of that product. That could get you in some big legal trouble too, because the law states that in order to make an endorsement, you have to have actually used the product or service in question, and you have to give your real opinion about it, and that otherwise the endorsement can be misleading and false advertising. So obviously, if you're using an impersonation of a celebrity to make an endorsement, that would be a huge problem. But there doesn't seem to be, as far as I'm aware, very much information legally about impersonating someone in an effort to just do a regular ad, not an endorsement, but a regular ad. So I don't know if there is a legal basis to hold convert software accountable, but I suspect that cases like this one and a few others that have popped up over the last year or so are going to lead to new legislation that will expressly cover these situations in the future. All right, So who do you go to? If you're employe lets you go in order to automate your job and then hand your job over to AI? What do you do? Well? May I suggest that you use an AI powered career counselor to get you out of the situation? Sounds a bit trippy. So this actually has to do with LinkedIn. LinkedIn has deployed an AI chat bot feature that's meant to serve as a kind of career advisor. At the moment, the feature is in limited run. Only the people who are actually LinkedIn premium subscribers can use this feature right now. And you don't just sit down with this AI chatbot and then have a deep soul searching heart to heart about where your career needs to go at the stage in your life. Instead, the chatbot will activate when you are attempting to evaluate a job offer or maybe a job listing and you're trying to figure out am I a good fit for this position? Neuel. You can ask those specific types of questions and a little drop down menu, and the chatbot will essentially do an analysis of your resume and job experience that kind of thing, and then also analyze the job listing in particular and give you some guidance as to whether or not maybe you're a good fit for the job, or maybe you're just pooling yourself and you should go back to being a sign spinner. No shade on sign spinners, by the way, folks got to get that Dala dolla, and goodness knows, I'd be the worst sign spinner in the history of the gig if I were to give it a try. Also, real talk, let's say I lose my job. I honestly do not know what I would do for a living at this point in my life. It is a sobering thought, and I think a lot of people struggle when they find themselves in a similar situation where maybe they've done a specific job for a very long time, maybe there aren't that many analogs out there where they could port their skins over to something else. It's terrifying. So I think a tool that can help someone prioritize their own time when they're in a job search mode, I think that's a great thing. I think that's a very good use of technology to help people kind of narrow their focus. However, several things need to be true in order for me to be really one hundred percent in favor of this tool. First, the tool needs to work right. It needs to actually work well. Second, I would want to see this tool rolled out to anyone who's a LinkedIn user, not just those who are premium subscribers, because I mean, if you're in a position where you need to find a new job, you might also be in a position where you can't really afford to pay for extras in order to get that new job. And I would like to see the people who need this the most have access to it without having to sacrifice to pay for that access. Three, I also hope this AI powered tool isn't prone to unfair bias. So, for example, I would hope the tool doesn't assume that a woman would just be a bad fit for an engineer position because she is a she. I would want all those things to be true in order to really feel good about this tool, So hopefully those are all true eventually. Okay, we've got a lot more news to go, but before we get to that, let's take a quick break. We're back. So the Attorney General for New York is going after a group of companies that are in the cryptocurrency space, and she's arguing that these companies have defrauded customers out of more than a billion dollars yikes, and they do have a connection with some pretty infamous failures in the crypto space from last year. So the companies that are part of this entire investigation and legal action include the Digital Currency Group, which is the parent company for another party in this in this legal action, Genesis. That's a crypto lending company, as well as a crypto exchange company called Gemini or if you preferred Gemini, and Gemini is the one that was co founded by the infamous Winkle Voss twins, you know, who also played a part in the early days of Facebook, and that's why it's called Gemini, right, Gemini are the twins when you're talking about astrology, So very clever. But the charges allege that these companies incurred massive losses and then tried to hide that information from investors because they wanted to keep the money flowing in. And if you're telling investors we're losing lots of money, chances are they're not going to be super willing to invest more into you. Now, one key element of the case involves what was a collaboration between Gemini, the crypto exchange, and Genesis, the crypto lending company. The service was called Gemini Earn Earn, So basically, the idea was that the investors who were using the crypto exchange Gemini, could loan money out to the crypto loaner company, Genesis. So Gemini customer says, all right, I will give X amount of my cash out to Genesis as a loan. Genesis in turn would loan that investor money out to its own customers, and the idea was that the customers would pay interest on the loan, Genesis would pay interest on the loaned money from the investors, and the money would trickle back up the chain and everybody would make cash right, So the interest rates were listed as high as eight percent. At certain points, you get eight percent return on your investment. Not bad. And according to the lawsuit, Gemini performed a risk analysis on Genesis and then determined that it would actually be really risky to loan money to Genesis, but Gemini did not communicate the information to its customers to the investors on Gemini, so they didn't tell the investors, hey, heads up, this is a risky loan. Instead they said, yeah, dog, it's totally safe and you can increase your wealth this way. Meanwhile, Genesis totally fumbled the bag because it was loaning out considerable amounts of money to entities that then went broke, one of which being Alimator Research. So if that name sounds familiar, that's because Alimator Research was one of the two crypto companies that Sam Bankman Freed co founded, you know, the other one being obviously the FTX Exchange, and Alimator Research went bankrupt. So this huge amount of money that was loan to Alamator Research was effectively lost. So this lawsuit is saying that JEM and I became aware that Genesis earned was not a good investment opportunity from a risk standpoint, but then specifically did not tell their own customers this information, which allowed the investors to continue to funnel money into an operation that was really not likely to create a return and in fact ended up being a huge failure. So this is another story pointing out how precarious a lot of the crypto community is. That's not to say that all cryptocurrency companies or crypto companies in general are in the same boat. I'm not saying they're all just a guaranteed loss. That's not what I'm saying. I am saying there are lots of examples of companies that are in that space that tried to capitalize on a boom period, Like they were really quick and rushing in, and they made some big, risky decisions, and then when that boom kind of ended, these companies found themselves out of their depth and a lot of them ended up collapsing. So just again a word of caution before you start investing into cryptocurrency. I'm not a financial advisor. I cannot give any sort of advice. Personally, I think that it is not worth the risk in most cases. I'm still not sold on cryptocurrency in general, I feel like it's largely a technology that benefits a few at the expense of many, similar to things like a pyramid scheme or a Ponzi scheme. I'm not saying that all cryptocurrencies are a Ponzi scheme either, just that there are some similarities, and I haven't seen a lot of evidence for, you know, like ones that are treated less as a commodity exchange and more like an actual currency. It's just it's rare. Okay. Reuter's reports that the company we Work could be filing for bankruptcy as early as next week. So first of all, to get this out of the way, we Work isn't really a tech company really, but I cover it because everyone treats it like it was a tech startup. It was a darling among tech venture capitalysts when we Work first launched, despite the fact that We Work's entire business model was predicated upon an idea that wasn't remotely new or innovative. It's it wasn't like we Work was breaking the mold and coming up with something that had never been tried before. It was actually a business idea that traditionally had proven to be really challenging, and one had pretty low profit margins. So we Work's business model, in case you're not aware, is the company purchases or leases office space in large, typically urban communities, and then it will lease or sub lease those spaces to various individuals and small companies so that they will have an office location they can use, but they don't have to go to the extent of actually, you know, purchasing or renting dedicated office space that would require a much larger financial investment, so they can save money by renting at a smaller fee a section of office space in this communal office location run by we Work. Now, that's it as far as the business plan goes. But the WeWork story has all sorts of bizarre twists and turns. Some of it is your classic conflict of interest stuff because it was discovered that the company's founder was acquiring a real estate on his own and then using we Work to purchase a lease from him for that property, which is certainly questionable. Right Like if you run a company and then on your own, you go out and buy something and then you direct your company to purchase the thing you bought at a huge profit for you personally, that there is pretty darn questionable. But on top of that, his wife was drafting some very weird corporate documents that seem to have more in common with Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop company, which you know, kind of makes more sense when you realize the two women are actually related to each other. The whole story is weird. There are entire documentaries about it, and great YouTube videos as well. Maybe at one point, we Work was seen as a being at like a massive disruptor in office real estate, but now the company finds itself on the verge of obsolescence tech stuff. We're more of a general kind of business podcast. I would probably do a full series of episodes about we Work and really dive into the evolution and fall of that company, but I think I'm going to leave that to other shows. It just figured I should cover this because we Work was treated as though it were a tech startup from the very beginning, and now we're seeing the end of it. Now let's talk about an actual tech company. So by the end of today, you know, Thursday, November two, Apple is expected to post a quarterly result that will indicate a decline in revenue for the fourth consecutive quarter. So, in other words, over the course of a year, Apple's revenue has declined quarter by quarter at least compared to the same time last year, right, and revenue decline is not something that you really want to see. This is all according to CNBC. Now, this is not to say that Apple is in trouble. That's not the case. Again, we're talking about decline in revenue, but we're not talking about the company losing money. It's just not making as much money as it did this time last year. The company is still making boatloads of money every year. The expectation for this quarter, which will know for sure by the end of today, but the expectations that Apple's going to report on making around eighty nine point two eight billion dollars in sales. That's billion with a B. That is an unimaginable amount of money to me. And that's just one quarter of the year. However, even at eighty nine point to eight billion dollars, that's still a one percent drop from what the company made in sales this time last year. Now, they're probably tons of reasons for this decline, and a lot of those reasons, I would argue are totally outside of Apple's direct control right, like the state of the economy in general is an example. Apple doesn't control that, and some people, I'm guessing, are willing to stick with their current technology and use it for maybe longer than they typically would because they're just trying to be a little more careful with their own personal budget. Then you also have Apple customers who might feel that some of the more recent products Apple has released just haven't been innovative enough or shown enough reasons to upgrade from what you're currently using. So this would be the people who say, oh, you know, Apple doesn't end up creating really cool products the way it used to. I don't necessarily disagree with that, I guess because part of it is that it's been a while since Apple has been able to introduce sort of a new product category and do the same thing that it did with things like it be three players with the iPod, smartphones with the iPhone tablet, computers with the iPad, et cetera. It's been a while since they've been able to do something like that, and I think a lot of people had this expectation that every few years, Apple was just going to come out with a new product line that would redefine a gadget and create a brand new way for Apple to print money. But that's hard to do, and it's also hard to like innovate in a way where you're significantly improving the performance and quality of the products you're making. So, you know, I don't fully blame Apple for this. I do think it puts a lot more pressure on the company to try and create those innovative products. I think Apple's experimentation with augmented and mixed reality kind of show that the company has been thinking about that but just hasn't been able to nail the execution in a way that I think is going to have a huge impact on the market. We'll see. Maybe I'm wrong. I've been wrong about lots of outher Apple stuff. I didn't think the iPad was going to make it, and I was completely wrong about that, So maybe I'm totally wrong about mixed reality too. We'll have to see. But I imagine that it's going to take another year for investors to really get super excited about Apple again in order to, you know, kind of reverse this trend. I don't think investors are losing hope in Apple, because again, the company is a juggernaut it makes so much money that it's hard to say, oh, well, I'm going to pull out Apple because their sales went down a little bit this year compared to last year. But then again, investors are finicky people at times, so who knows. Okay, I got a few more stories to cover. But before I do that, let's take another quick break. So we're back, and there is a deal. It's actually been in development for several years I think five years now that may finally be close to closing in the not too distant future. And I'm talking about the Walt Disney companies purchase of the streaming platform Hulu. So Disney has been part of Hulu for years, Like that's not new. But once upon a time, Hulu was kind of a collaborative project. There were a lot of different companies that were part of Hulu early on, largely because these were companies that were trying to oppose Netflix. The idea being that they didn't want to lose control of who actually has access to certain content. The studios thought, well, if we have our own streaming platform, we can compete against Netflix. Netflix will not be the only game in town. They will not dominate the streaming landscape. So Hulu became a thing. These days, however, the stakeholders really come down to Disney and then Comcast. Comcast owns about a third, in fact a third of Hulu, like thirty three percent of Hulu. So again, five years ago, these two entities agreed that Disney would purchase Hulu in total and pay out Comcast for its shares. They recently came to an agreement about how much that will be. At minimum, which is eight point six one billion dollars. That's what Disney will have to pay to get full ownership of Hulu. And again that's not for all of Hulu. That's representing one third of Hulu now, I say at least, because the amount actually will depend upon what Hulu's fair market value was on September thirtieth, that's when this agreement actually happened, although we're only really hearing details about it now as we're getting close to earnings calls and such. So the eight point six one was based on a minimum valuation that of Hulu being twenty seven point five billion dollars. But that agreement was made half a decade ago. It was kind of just based off of projections, so it's possible that on September thirtieth, Hulu's fair market value was higher than twenty seven point five billion dollars, perhaps even significantly higher. And if that's the case, Disney will be beholden to make up the difference of that, you know, thirty three percent of that. So like if instead of twenty seven point five billion, uh an analysis says that on September thirtieth of this year, Hulu is worth like forty billion. Disney's going to have to pay the difference there to in addition to that eight point six one billion dollars to complete the transaction. So it's not paid for and done, but it's up. It'll be interesting to see what Disney does. You know, We've heard rumors that Disney plans on integrating Hulu with the Disney Plus streaming platform, which is the one reason why I haven't subscribed to Hulu. I am a Disney Plus subscriber, and I thought, well, maybe I'll just wait because if these two merge, I may end up just you know, I'll probably have to pay more because I can't imagine the price remaining the same, but I may be able to access both on the same platform. So we'll see Disney is going to hold an earnings call next week, so there's a good chance that I will have an update next week and I can talk more about it then. The Guardian here this is our technically our final story, but I do have some recommendations afterwards. But The Guardian reports that the Pentagon here in the United States has launched an online reporting tool for folks who have information about unidentified anomalist phenomena or UAPs. So UAP is the current acceptable term for what we used to call UFOs right unidentified flying objects now at the moment, this tool is not open to the public. Right now, only folks who have quote direct knowledge of US government programs or activities related to UAP dating back to nineteen forty five end quote have access to this particular tool, which is like an online form. The Pentagon does plan to roll out a publicly accessible version of this tool sometime in the future. I don't have a timeline on that, but it is supposed to be coming. You could not pay me enough to be the person who has to filter through all the stuff that's going to come through that public portal. I'm sure they're going to be countless hoaxes there'll be people who are just playing trolling, they'll be true believers who are spouting off stuff about UAPs. The sheer volume of weirdness that is going to hit that inbox is unfathomable to me. This is all part of the US government's attempt to make the whole UAP investigation stuff more transparent. So does this mean, like various conspiracy theories have argued that the US government has secretly been hiding evidence of aliens, that maybe we've even found examples of alien technology and then reverse engineered it in order to create amazing updates to our tech. No, it does not mean that. In fact, the government officials who have been part of this project say I'm not aware of anyone doing anything even remotely related to that. So if it's happening, I've never heard of it. I suspect that no amount of transparency is ever going to eliminate the various stories that circulate about suspect did cover ups and conspiracies all meant to hide the truth from the rest of US. I don't think that that's at all likely. I don't think it's even possible. But I don't think there's any way to ever stop those stories, I still find it very difficult to believe that any alien civilization has visited us, not because it would be completely impossible, but when you start the factor in the requirements that would be necessary for aliens to get here, it becomes diminishingly likely that it's happened. And by that I mean, let's take into consideration what has to happen for aliens to find us. So, assuming that the aliens are looking for signs of things like radio communications, which would indicate that there's the presence of an intelligent life somewhere, well, radio travels at the speed of light, and let's say this alien civilization is three hundred light years away from us. Well, we've only been really making radio communications for a little more than a century, so it would still take two hundred years for those very weak radio signals to even be detectable to a civilization that's three hundred light years away. Then you have to actually travel that distance to get here on Earth. And even if they had light speed travel, which as far as we are aware, is impossible to do unless you are some sort of life form that's pure energy, then it's going to take you three hundred years at minimum, to make that journey. So we're talking five hundred years out from when we started transmitting in radio waves. That's what I mean when I say I just don't think it's likely that we've been visited by aliens. Now, could an alien civilization capable of space travel, just by happenstance come across Earth. I guess I don't know why they would like just randomly joy writing across the universe and then you make a little pitstop in a tiny little solar system and you happen to land on a planet that supports life like that just again seems unlikely, But I digress. I'm sure that this tool is going to get a lot of use, and my thoughts go out to whomever it is that has to go through all that information. Okay, before we wrap up, I do have a couple of article suggestions for you all today. One is from MIT News. David L. Chandler is the author of this piece. It is titled Engineers develop an efficient process to make fuel from carbon dioxide. So, as the title indicates, the story is all about how some researchers have used a variety of different strategies to make it more practical to turn CO two into a stable fuel, and you would be able to store this fuel for an indefinite amount of time and use the fuel to power stuff like you could use it to do things like heat homes and things like that, or use it in fuel cells typically, and you would also be tapping into renewable energy sources to actually power the conversion processes. So, in other words, you could find ways to turn the CO two into fuel without having to place more demand on carbon generating power plants. It's an interesting read. I am curious as to what byproducts the fuel produces when it's consumed, right, you know, like your typical fuel cell uses hydrogen and oxygen to generate electricity, and the byproducts are heat and water vapor, and that's it. I don't know what the byproducts are for the CO two based fuel cells, and I should look at it up and read into it, but I think the article itself is worth a read. The other article recommendation I have is from Rollingstone dot com. It is titled HBO bosses used secret fake accounts to troll TV critics. This one's by Cheyenne Roundtree, and again the title shows that some executives over at HBO really wanted to make some TV critics feel badly about their opinions about HBO programs, and this happened a couple of years ago, and honestly, reading over the messages that were part of this ridiculous campaign over at HBO gave me real mean girls in high school vibes. So check it out. That's it for the Tech News for Thursday, November second, twenty twenty three. I hope you are all well 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 there, Welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for November two, twenty twenty three, rapidly running out of days. In twenty twenty three and yesterday, I did an episode about the history of ad blockers, But one thing I didn't really cover in great detail was YouTube and YouTube's battle against ad blocking. Well, the platform has been rolling out an escalating response to users who have been employing ad blockers on YouTube while trying to watch YouTube videos. Gizmoto's Kevin Hurler has a piece on this on Gizmoto titled YouTube's ad blocker crackdown is getting harder to dodge, and he explains that earlier in October, YouTube began to show a pop up notification to ad blocker users, and the notification said that video playback would not work until the user disabled ad block or otherwise whitelisted YouTube. Now, initially, folks could just close out the pop up and continue on their merry way. A little bit later, YouTube beef this up. They then had a little checkbox you had to click on to notify YouTube that you were acknowledging you had been alerted to this policy, that you should not be using ad blockers, that this is against YouTube's terms of service, and then you could go on your merry way. Now, YouTube will just keep that pop up in place, and it'll block all activity. You won't be able to do anything else on YouTube until you actually take the steps to either disable or pause ad blocking entirely, or to whitelist YouTube. Hurler also points out that the Wall Street Journal has tracked YouTube's ad revenue over the last three quarters and that revenue has been on the decline. So we're not saying that YouTube is losing money. It's not that. It's just they're not making as much money as they had previously. It's going down. That's a trend that most companies are not super happy about. YouTube has been pushing for a lot more folks to subscribe to YouTube premium. That's been a campaign that's been going on for several months now, and they have also introduced a lot of new types of ads, including unskippable ads, longer ones too like it used to be that an unskippable ad would last maybe five or ten seconds, but now we have full thirty second unskippable ads on say YouTube TV, for example. And it has also started to remove some of the controls that video creators had when it came to where they would place ads against their content. I remember talking about how some ASMR creators were very upset because at least initially, it looked like they wouldn't have the opportunity to specify that ads should only be pre roll, for example, a not post roll, and that by removing that control, it meant that an ASMR AD or an ASMR video rather might have allowed an intrusive ad play after the video, thus potentially undoing all the work that the ASMR video was intended to do. Well. I suspect we're going to continue to see shifts in strategy from YouTube because they're going to continue to try and find the most lucrative way to make as much money as possible. That's kind of what businesses do. And I'm sure we'll also see new approaches to ad blocking go on as well. And so it goes. David Ingram and kat Tinbarge have a really good piece over at Nbcnews dot Com. It's titled critics renewed Calls for a TikTok band, claiming play has an anti Israel bias. So the journalists walk a pretty tight line in an attempt to be really objective in this piece, and they explain that several politicians are saying that TikTok is spreading propaganda to young people and favoring a pro Palestinian stance over a pro Israeli stance that with regard to the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. But the reporters actually found that if you look at the stats on TikTok in the United States over the last month or so, the period of time covered by the point when Hamas attacked Israel and then Israel's response to that attack, not only are posts with a hashtag such as stand with Palestine not outpacing ones that have the hashtag stand with Israel, but also that those Israel posts are actually outperforming the Palestine ones. So, in other words, the stats seem to directly contradict the claims these politicians are making. They're saying there's this anti Israel bias across TikTok. The reporters are saying, well, based upon what we're seeing at least over the last thirty days or so here in the United States, there doesn't appear to be any indication of bias. In fact, we're seeing a trend toward the opposite if you're looking at those stats. The reporters say that the claims appear to be based mostly on anecdotal evidence, and also by taking sort of a longer view across the entire history of TikTok. Like if you look at all of TikTok's history and you're looking at the trends of you know, stand with say, stand with a Palestine or stand with Israel, then things get a little less clear, right, because you're looking across the entire history of the platform, but not the current events. And we all also know that anecdotal evidence is really useless with TikTok, right because TikTok's algorithm looks at what content you are engaging with on the platform, and then TikTok essentially draws the conclusion of, Oh, this is what this person wants to see, so let me just give them a whole bunch more of that. It reminds me of a routine that Patton Oswalt used to do where he talked about tvo, where he said he used TVO to record a couple of Westerns that he wanted to watch, and then TVO made the conclusion that he just really liked content that had horses in it, and so he got a whole bunch of horse content recorded on his behalf. This is sort of what it's reminding me of, which means that, you know, if you were to go on TikTok and let's say you actually did see a pro Palestinian video and you objected to that video for whatever reason, and maybe you even leave a comment giving your different point of view and what I am sure would be a reasonable and polite way, then TikTok doesn't see that as, Oh, this person ends up disagreeing with this content, I should show other points of view instead, TikTok says, Oh, this user has engaged with this content, I should show them a whole bunch of the same sort of stuff. So to you, the user, it seems like there's just this flood of content presenting just one side of an issue, and you might not see very many, if any, examples of the other side. But that's a very different thing than arguing that the entire platform has a bias. In fact, the reporters even point out that in other nations governments are actually arguing that the opposite is true, that TikTok has a pro Israel and anti Palestinian bias. So there are different governments making opposite conclusions about a supposed bias within TikTok. And I think the truth of the matter is this is really more to do with the sort of brute force approach of TikTok's algorithm. That is probably, in my opinion, what is fueling this, and that you know, I'm not a huge fan of TikTok, right, I do have some concerns about the potential link to China. That is something that I worry about, although I also acknowledge that as far as I can determine, there's not really much evidence to point to actual cases of Chinese officials using TikTok to you know, surveil national security matters or anything like that. But the potential is there, and that's what is I think a little concerning. But I don't really know that it's you know, that this particular argument has much merit. In fact, I think it doesn't have much merit the argument that TikTok has some sort of specific bias when it goes to the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas. I think that in most cases it's either a failing of critical thinking, or perhaps it's someone who's trying to score political points by you bashing against TikTok, or perhaps a combination of the two that's really to blame here. Next up, Scarlett Johansson is the latest famous person in a face off against artificial intelligence. The Verge reports that Johansson's lawyer is taking legal action against a software developer company. That company is called Convert Software or Convert Software. The company creates an app that's called Lisa AI nineties Yearbook an avatar and ran an advertisement about this app, and it included an AI generated copy of Johanson's voice. So it starts off with like a little segment of a behind the scenes thing from her filming of Black Widow, and then you get the a imitation of Johansson giving information about this app. Apparently this was all done without Johanson's knowledge or consent. And while the ad did feature a little bit of text that said the person in the app doesn't have anything to do with the app itself. Her lawyer is saying, that doesn't really cut the mustard, and we are definitely getting into some tricky territory here. As I've talked about before, the laws here in the United States aren't exactly up to date with technological capabilities. There are very few protections in place when it comes to impersonation. Now, there are limits, like if you were to go so far as to impersonate someone in an effort to slander them, for example, that would be something that you could take legal action against because it goes under slander. Or if you were to impersonate someone and have that person apparently endorse a product, not just voice an ad, but to actually say that they had used and approved of that product. That could get you in some big legal trouble too, because the law states that in order to make an endorsement, you have to have actually used the product or service in question, and you have to give your real opinion about it, and that otherwise the endorsement can be misleading and false advertising. So obviously, if you're using an impersonation of a celebrity to make an endorsement, that would be a huge problem. But there doesn't seem to be, as far as I'm aware, very much information legally about impersonating someone in an effort to just do a regular ad, not an endorsement, but a regular ad. So I don't know if there is a legal basis to hold convert software accountable, but I suspect that cases like this one and a few others that have popped up over the last year or so are going to lead to new legislation that will expressly cover these situations in the future. All right, So who do you go to? If you're employe lets you go in order to automate your job and then hand your job over to AI? What do you do? Well? May I suggest that you use an AI powered career counselor to get you out of the situation? Sounds a bit trippy. So this actually has to do with LinkedIn. LinkedIn has deployed an AI chat bot feature that's meant to serve as a kind of career advisor. At the moment, the feature is in limited run. Only the people who are actually LinkedIn premium subscribers can use this feature right now. And you don't just sit down with this AI chatbot and then have a deep soul searching heart to heart about where your career needs to go at the stage in your life. Instead, the chatbot will activate when you are attempting to evaluate a job offer or maybe a job listing and you're trying to figure out am I a good fit for this position? Neuel. You can ask those specific types of questions and a little drop down menu, and the chatbot will essentially do an analysis of your resume and job experience that kind of thing, and then also analyze the job listing in particular and give you some guidance as to whether or not maybe you're a good fit for the job, or maybe you're just pooling yourself and you should go back to being a sign spinner. No shade on sign spinners, by the way, folks got to get that Dala dolla, and goodness knows, I'd be the worst sign spinner in the history of the gig if I were to give it a try. Also, real talk, let's say I lose my job. I honestly do not know what I would do for a living at this point in my life. It is a sobering thought, and I think a lot of people struggle when they find themselves in a similar situation where maybe they've done a specific job for a very long time, maybe there aren't that many analogs out there where they could port their skins over to something else. It's terrifying. So I think a tool that can help someone prioritize their own time when they're in a job search mode, I think that's a great thing. I think that's a very good use of technology to help people kind of narrow their focus. However, several things need to be true in order for me to be really one hundred percent in favor of this tool. First, the tool needs to work right. It needs to actually work well. Second, I would want to see this tool rolled out to anyone who's a LinkedIn user, not just those who are premium subscribers, because I mean, if you're in a position where you need to find a new job, you might also be in a position where you can't really afford to pay for extras in order to get that new job. And I would like to see the people who need this the most have access to it without having to sacrifice to pay for that access. Three, I also hope this AI powered tool isn't prone to unfair bias. So, for example, I would hope the tool doesn't assume that a woman would just be a bad fit for an engineer position because she is a she. I would want all those things to be true in order to really feel good about this tool, So hopefully those are all true eventually. Okay, we've got a lot more news to go, but before we get to that, let's take a quick break. We're back. So the Attorney General for New York is going after a group of companies that are in the cryptocurrency space, and she's arguing that these companies have defrauded customers out of more than a billion dollars yikes, and they do have a connection with some pretty infamous failures in the crypto space from last year. So the companies that are part of this entire investigation and legal action include the Digital Currency Group, which is the parent company for another party in this in this legal action, Genesis. That's a crypto lending company, as well as a crypto exchange company called Gemini or if you preferred Gemini, and Gemini is the one that was co founded by the infamous Winkle Voss twins, you know, who also played a part in the early days of Facebook, and that's why it's called Gemini, right, Gemini are the twins when you're talking about astrology, So very clever. But the charges allege that these companies incurred massive losses and then tried to hide that information from investors because they wanted to keep the money flowing in. And if you're telling investors we're losing lots of money, chances are they're not going to be super willing to invest more into you. Now, one key element of the case involves what was a collaboration between Gemini, the crypto exchange, and Genesis, the crypto lending company. The service was called Gemini Earn Earn, So basically, the idea was that the investors who were using the crypto exchange Gemini, could loan money out to the crypto loaner company, Genesis. So Gemini customer says, all right, I will give X amount of my cash out to Genesis as a loan. Genesis in turn would loan that investor money out to its own customers, and the idea was that the customers would pay interest on the loan, Genesis would pay interest on the loaned money from the investors, and the money would trickle back up the chain and everybody would make cash right, So the interest rates were listed as high as eight percent. At certain points, you get eight percent return on your investment. Not bad. And according to the lawsuit, Gemini performed a risk analysis on Genesis and then determined that it would actually be really risky to loan money to Genesis, but Gemini did not communicate the information to its customers to the investors on Gemini, so they didn't tell the investors, hey, heads up, this is a risky loan. Instead they said, yeah, dog, it's totally safe and you can increase your wealth this way. Meanwhile, Genesis totally fumbled the bag because it was loaning out considerable amounts of money to entities that then went broke, one of which being Alimator Research. So if that name sounds familiar, that's because Alimator Research was one of the two crypto companies that Sam Bankman Freed co founded, you know, the other one being obviously the FTX Exchange, and Alimator Research went bankrupt. So this huge amount of money that was loan to Alamator Research was effectively lost. So this lawsuit is saying that JEM and I became aware that Genesis earned was not a good investment opportunity from a risk standpoint, but then specifically did not tell their own customers this information, which allowed the investors to continue to funnel money into an operation that was really not likely to create a return and in fact ended up being a huge failure. So this is another story pointing out how precarious a lot of the crypto community is. That's not to say that all cryptocurrency companies or crypto companies in general are in the same boat. I'm not saying they're all just a guaranteed loss. That's not what I'm saying. I am saying there are lots of examples of companies that are in that space that tried to capitalize on a boom period, Like they were really quick and rushing in, and they made some big, risky decisions, and then when that boom kind of ended, these companies found themselves out of their depth and a lot of them ended up collapsing. So just again a word of caution before you start investing into cryptocurrency. I'm not a financial advisor. I cannot give any sort of advice. Personally, I think that it is not worth the risk in most cases. I'm still not sold on cryptocurrency in general, I feel like it's largely a technology that benefits a few at the expense of many, similar to things like a pyramid scheme or a Ponzi scheme. I'm not saying that all cryptocurrencies are a Ponzi scheme either, just that there are some similarities, and I haven't seen a lot of evidence for, you know, like ones that are treated less as a commodity exchange and more like an actual currency. It's just it's rare. Okay. Reuter's reports that the company we Work could be filing for bankruptcy as early as next week. So first of all, to get this out of the way, we Work isn't really a tech company really, but I cover it because everyone treats it like it was a tech startup. It was a darling among tech venture capitalysts when we Work first launched, despite the fact that We Work's entire business model was predicated upon an idea that wasn't remotely new or innovative. It's it wasn't like we Work was breaking the mold and coming up with something that had never been tried before. It was actually a business idea that traditionally had proven to be really challenging, and one had pretty low profit margins. So we Work's business model, in case you're not aware, is the company purchases or leases office space in large, typically urban communities, and then it will lease or sub lease those spaces to various individuals and small companies so that they will have an office location they can use, but they don't have to go to the extent of actually, you know, purchasing or renting dedicated office space that would require a much larger financial investment, so they can save money by renting at a smaller fee a section of office space in this communal office location run by we Work. Now, that's it as far as the business plan goes. But the WeWork story has all sorts of bizarre twists and turns. Some of it is your classic conflict of interest stuff because it was discovered that the company's founder was acquiring a real estate on his own and then using we Work to purchase a lease from him for that property, which is certainly questionable. Right Like if you run a company and then on your own, you go out and buy something and then you direct your company to purchase the thing you bought at a huge profit for you personally, that there is pretty darn questionable. But on top of that, his wife was drafting some very weird corporate documents that seem to have more in common with Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop company, which you know, kind of makes more sense when you realize the two women are actually related to each other. The whole story is weird. There are entire documentaries about it, and great YouTube videos as well. Maybe at one point, we Work was seen as a being at like a massive disruptor in office real estate, but now the company finds itself on the verge of obsolescence tech stuff. We're more of a general kind of business podcast. I would probably do a full series of episodes about we Work and really dive into the evolution and fall of that company, but I think I'm going to leave that to other shows. It just figured I should cover this because we Work was treated as though it were a tech startup from the very beginning, and now we're seeing the end of it. Now let's talk about an actual tech company. So by the end of today, you know, Thursday, November two, Apple is expected to post a quarterly result that will indicate a decline in revenue for the fourth consecutive quarter. So, in other words, over the course of a year, Apple's revenue has declined quarter by quarter at least compared to the same time last year, right, and revenue decline is not something that you really want to see. This is all according to CNBC. Now, this is not to say that Apple is in trouble. That's not the case. Again, we're talking about decline in revenue, but we're not talking about the company losing money. It's just not making as much money as it did this time last year. The company is still making boatloads of money every year. The expectation for this quarter, which will know for sure by the end of today, but the expectations that Apple's going to report on making around eighty nine point two eight billion dollars in sales. That's billion with a B. That is an unimaginable amount of money to me. And that's just one quarter of the year. However, even at eighty nine point to eight billion dollars, that's still a one percent drop from what the company made in sales this time last year. Now, they're probably tons of reasons for this decline, and a lot of those reasons, I would argue are totally outside of Apple's direct control right, like the state of the economy in general is an example. Apple doesn't control that, and some people, I'm guessing, are willing to stick with their current technology and use it for maybe longer than they typically would because they're just trying to be a little more careful with their own personal budget. Then you also have Apple customers who might feel that some of the more recent products Apple has released just haven't been innovative enough or shown enough reasons to upgrade from what you're currently using. So this would be the people who say, oh, you know, Apple doesn't end up creating really cool products the way it used to. I don't necessarily disagree with that, I guess because part of it is that it's been a while since Apple has been able to introduce sort of a new product category and do the same thing that it did with things like it be three players with the iPod, smartphones with the iPhone tablet, computers with the iPad, et cetera. It's been a while since they've been able to do something like that, and I think a lot of people had this expectation that every few years, Apple was just going to come out with a new product line that would redefine a gadget and create a brand new way for Apple to print money. But that's hard to do, and it's also hard to like innovate in a way where you're significantly improving the performance and quality of the products you're making. So, you know, I don't fully blame Apple for this. I do think it puts a lot more pressure on the company to try and create those innovative products. I think Apple's experimentation with augmented and mixed reality kind of show that the company has been thinking about that but just hasn't been able to nail the execution in a way that I think is going to have a huge impact on the market. We'll see. Maybe I'm wrong. I've been wrong about lots of outher Apple stuff. I didn't think the iPad was going to make it, and I was completely wrong about that, So maybe I'm totally wrong about mixed reality too. We'll have to see. But I imagine that it's going to take another year for investors to really get super excited about Apple again in order to, you know, kind of reverse this trend. I don't think investors are losing hope in Apple, because again, the company is a juggernaut it makes so much money that it's hard to say, oh, well, I'm going to pull out Apple because their sales went down a little bit this year compared to last year. But then again, investors are finicky people at times, so who knows. Okay, I got a few more stories to cover. But before I do that, let's take another quick break. So we're back, and there is a deal. It's actually been in development for several years I think five years now that may finally be close to closing in the not too distant future. And I'm talking about the Walt Disney companies purchase of the streaming platform Hulu. So Disney has been part of Hulu for years, Like that's not new. But once upon a time, Hulu was kind of a collaborative project. There were a lot of different companies that were part of Hulu early on, largely because these were companies that were trying to oppose Netflix. The idea being that they didn't want to lose control of who actually has access to certain content. The studios thought, well, if we have our own streaming platform, we can compete against Netflix. Netflix will not be the only game in town. They will not dominate the streaming landscape. So Hulu became a thing. These days, however, the stakeholders really come down to Disney and then Comcast. Comcast owns about a third, in fact a third of Hulu, like thirty three percent of Hulu. So again, five years ago, these two entities agreed that Disney would purchase Hulu in total and pay out Comcast for its shares. They recently came to an agreement about how much that will be. At minimum, which is eight point six one billion dollars. That's what Disney will have to pay to get full ownership of Hulu. And again that's not for all of Hulu. That's representing one third of Hulu now, I say at least, because the amount actually will depend upon what Hulu's fair market value was on September thirtieth, that's when this agreement actually happened, although we're only really hearing details about it now as we're getting close to earnings calls and such. So the eight point six one was based on a minimum valuation that of Hulu being twenty seven point five billion dollars. But that agreement was made half a decade ago. It was kind of just based off of projections, so it's possible that on September thirtieth, Hulu's fair market value was higher than twenty seven point five billion dollars, perhaps even significantly higher. And if that's the case, Disney will be beholden to make up the difference of that, you know, thirty three percent of that. So like if instead of twenty seven point five billion, uh an analysis says that on September thirtieth of this year, Hulu is worth like forty billion. Disney's going to have to pay the difference there to in addition to that eight point six one billion dollars to complete the transaction. So it's not paid for and done, but it's up. It'll be interesting to see what Disney does. You know, We've heard rumors that Disney plans on integrating Hulu with the Disney Plus streaming platform, which is the one reason why I haven't subscribed to Hulu. I am a Disney Plus subscriber, and I thought, well, maybe I'll just wait because if these two merge, I may end up just you know, I'll probably have to pay more because I can't imagine the price remaining the same, but I may be able to access both on the same platform. So we'll see Disney is going to hold an earnings call next week, so there's a good chance that I will have an update next week and I can talk more about it then. The Guardian here this is our technically our final story, but I do have some recommendations afterwards. But The Guardian reports that the Pentagon here in the United States has launched an online reporting tool for folks who have information about unidentified anomalist phenomena or UAPs. So UAP is the current acceptable term for what we used to call UFOs right unidentified flying objects now at the moment, this tool is not open to the public. Right now, only folks who have quote direct knowledge of US government programs or activities related to UAP dating back to nineteen forty five end quote have access to this particular tool, which is like an online form. The Pentagon does plan to roll out a publicly accessible version of this tool sometime in the future. I don't have a timeline on that, but it is supposed to be coming. You could not pay me enough to be the person who has to filter through all the stuff that's going to come through that public portal. I'm sure they're going to be countless hoaxes there'll be people who are just playing trolling, they'll be true believers who are spouting off stuff about UAPs. The sheer volume of weirdness that is going to hit that inbox is unfathomable to me. This is all part of the US government's attempt to make the whole UAP investigation stuff more transparent. So does this mean, like various conspiracy theories have argued that the US government has secretly been hiding evidence of aliens, that maybe we've even found examples of alien technology and then reverse engineered it in order to create amazing updates to our tech. No, it does not mean that. In fact, the government officials who have been part of this project say I'm not aware of anyone doing anything even remotely related to that. So if it's happening, I've never heard of it. I suspect that no amount of transparency is ever going to eliminate the various stories that circulate about suspect did cover ups and conspiracies all meant to hide the truth from the rest of US. I don't think that that's at all likely. I don't think it's even possible. But I don't think there's any way to ever stop those stories, I still find it very difficult to believe that any alien civilization has visited us, not because it would be completely impossible, but when you start the factor in the requirements that would be necessary for aliens to get here, it becomes diminishingly likely that it's happened. And by that I mean, let's take into consideration what has to happen for aliens to find us. So, assuming that the aliens are looking for signs of things like radio communications, which would indicate that there's the presence of an intelligent life somewhere, well, radio travels at the speed of light, and let's say this alien civilization is three hundred light years away from us. Well, we've only been really making radio communications for a little more than a century, so it would still take two hundred years for those very weak radio signals to even be detectable to a civilization that's three hundred light years away. Then you have to actually travel that distance to get here on Earth. And even if they had light speed travel, which as far as we are aware, is impossible to do unless you are some sort of life form that's pure energy, then it's going to take you three hundred years at minimum, to make that journey. So we're talking five hundred years out from when we started transmitting in radio waves. That's what I mean when I say I just don't think it's likely that we've been visited by aliens. Now, could an alien civilization capable of space travel, just by happenstance come across Earth. I guess I don't know why they would like just randomly joy writing across the universe and then you make a little pitstop in a tiny little solar system and you happen to land on a planet that supports life like that just again seems unlikely, But I digress. I'm sure that this tool is going to get a lot of use, and my thoughts go out to whomever it is that has to go through all that information. Okay, before we wrap up, I do have a couple of article suggestions for you all today. One is from MIT News. David L. Chandler is the author of this piece. It is titled Engineers develop an efficient process to make fuel from carbon dioxide. So, as the title indicates, the story is all about how some researchers have used a variety of different strategies to make it more practical to turn CO two into a stable fuel, and you would be able to store this fuel for an indefinite amount of time and use the fuel to power stuff like you could use it to do things like heat homes and things like that, or use it in fuel cells typically, and you would also be tapping into renewable energy sources to actually power the conversion processes. So, in other words, you could find ways to turn the CO two into fuel without having to place more demand on carbon generating power plants. It's an interesting read. I am curious as to what byproducts the fuel produces when it's consumed, right, you know, like your typical fuel cell uses hydrogen and oxygen to generate electricity, and the byproducts are heat and water vapor, and that's it. I don't know what the byproducts are for the CO two based fuel cells, and I should look at it up and read into it, but I think the article itself is worth a read. The other article recommendation I have is from Rollingstone dot com. It is titled HBO bosses used secret fake accounts to troll TV critics. This one's by Cheyenne Roundtree, and again the title shows that some executives over at HBO really wanted to make some TV critics feel badly about their opinions about HBO programs, and this happened a couple of years ago, and honestly, reading over the messages that were part of this ridiculous campaign over at HBO gave me real mean girls in high school vibes. So check it out. That's it for the Tech News for Thursday, November second, twenty twenty three. I hope you are all well 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