From massive data breaches to Uber's scandalous year, we take a look at some of the biggest tech stories to break in 2017.
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Get text with technology with tech Stuff from dot Com. Hey there, and welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickling. I'm an executive producer here at How Stuff Works, and there are a few episodes of tech Stuff I try to do every year. It's kind of become a tradition. And this is the first of that series of episodes that happens to cap off each year as as best I can. Anyway, this is a look back on the previous twelve months in tech Stories. Now I want to take a quick look at some of the biggest stories in tech that happened in and just so I'm totally transparent and everyone at home listening can understand this, I'm actually recording this episode on December seven, which means there's like an extra month of stories and gossip and scandals that are not gonna make the cut as they ain't happen yet. What when I'm recording this, they'll happen by the time you hear this. So I apologize for that, but the predictions episodes have proven over and over again. I am not someone who can see into the future, so I might chat a little bit about some stuff that's coming up later on in December. As I record this, it'll of course be in your past and maybe we'll see how it turns out by that point. But let's start where every year starts in January, according to the calendar that I I follow. Anyway, if you've been keeping up with tech stuff, you know I recently did a full series about the company Xerox. Well, January one was when Xerox officially split into two companies. One of them continue to carry the name Xerox, and that one is all about the traditional document businesses that we tend to think about when we hear the name Xerox. The other company is now known as Conduit and is one focused on business process services. So that happened, knocking January off right off the bat. Also in January, very early, I went to c e S I was formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show. Ramsey was also there. A whole bunch of us from how Stuff Works went this past year, and some of the stuff that got a lot of attention during that year's c e S included Amazon's Alexa product. I apologize if I just activated your Alexa, but it was getting incorporated into all sorts of devices, including vehicles, There were dozens of different smart devices on display, like weird ones too, like smart pillows that could tell you when you were snoring, as if I needed that. I've got a wife who punches me whenever it happens. There were self balancing motorcycles. There were fancy concept cars like Faraday Futures vehicle. There were ultra high definition displays with amazing resolution and color representation. There were self driving vehicles. There were luetooth toasters for crying out loud. In other words, it was a mix of amazing, amusing, and befuddling technology, which is pretty much par for the course. I went with a team of several talented people here at how stuff works. We explored the floor and we shot lots of videos so you can actually find those if you want to be nostalgic and look at the the cutting technology of yesteryear. Literally, this coming ce S will be the first one I will miss in ten years, And by miss, I mean I won't attend it. I'm not going to actually miss it. I'm actually okay with sitting one out for once now. One story that got Nintendo fans excited early in seventeen was the unveiling of the Switch that's Nintendo's latest gaming console. The Switch can be played as a portable gaming device, or it can be docked in a into a station and connect with a television. Controllers include detachable handheld devices that are called joy cons, and when the console went on sale later in demand far exceeded supply, particularly here in the States. This is not an unusual story for Nintendo. It's pretty much their m O whenever they release a new product. In fact, as of December, it can still be challenging to find a Nintendo Switch in some markets. Games like Legend of Zelda, Breath of the Wild, and Super Mario Odyssey were able to leverage the love of iconic franchises while also incorporating new types of gameplay into the world's and they have received some good critical response. So the system appears to be a step in the right direction for a Nintendo which clearly needed to recover after the WEU came out to less than uproarious applause. We also learned more in January about the fires that were being caused by Samsung Notes seven hand sets. You might remember that story from where some hand sets were spontaneously catch fire and it led to a an industry wide ban in the airline industry for Samsung Notes sevens, who had the office officers actually confiscating Notes sevens before passengers could get onto planes. Well, the company conducted a four month long investigation, and in January seventeen they announced that the problem was due to some irregularly sized batteries which would lead to overheating and that would then lead to fires. Moving on to February, one of the troubling themes in seventeen, and this is putting it lightly, has revolved around allegations of sexual harassment and related charges. And I want to be clear here. The troubling thing for me is seeing how systemic this culture has been across multiple industries. I don't mean it's troubling that victims are coming forward. It's good that they are. It's rather troubling that there was such an enormous environment for victimization in the first place. Well, in February seen one of the earliest instances of this in the tech industry was of a former Uber employee named Susan Fowler, who claimed that the car service company, the ride hailing service company Uber, had a toxic culture filled with misogynistic executives and a permissive attitude towards unacceptable behavior. Her accusations were such that it it essentially forced Uber to launch an internal investigation on its practices and its culture. That investigation continued for months, and in early June, news broke that Uber had fired more than twenty employees as a result of this investigation at all levels within the company. And yes, there's gonna be a lot about Uber in this episode because stuff went whackadoodle crazy over there. So you could call this episode Uber what Happen because that's gonna come back multiple times. There's hardly a month that doesn't have an Uber story in it. On February eleven, North Korea test fired a ballistic missile across the Sea of Japan, and this also becomes a big story throughout the year. This set the stage for a very tense game of posturing between North Korea and other nations, particularly the United States. And this was just one of a few tests throughout seen that caught the world's attention. Another in July demonstrate that North Korea had an intercontinental ballistic missile, and it became clear that North Korea had developed or acquired some powerful missiles capable of carrying a payload a great distance as far as the United States, and that was only a matter of time before those missiles would be outfitted with nuclear warheads. And as someone who lived through the Cold War and an era of mutually assured destruction, the story did not exactly set my heart to singing. But this is a story that's still playing out today. In February, Disney's Maker Studios dropped Peautie Pie YouTube superstar from its network because of a some videos that Ptpie had had published in which he had voiced some anti Semitic messages, some uh slurs against Jewish people. He included some Nazi imagery and a couple and Disney dropped him like a hot potato, and then YouTube followed suit, canceling a planned season two of pd pis series Scare Beauty Pie. The company also removed him from the Google Preferred Advertising program, and this caused a big discussion in the online world about the the rights of creators the rights of platforms. Uh. Also, it was just feeding into a generally toxic environment online about harassment and and really awful trollish behaviors, which was kind of a theme throughout March I have a happy story to start with March, and I'm thankful for it because there's so many negative ones that happened in But in March, SpaceX successfully launched a used Falcon nine first stage rocket, and that proved the usefulness of reusable launch vehicles. This brings down the costs of launching a payload into space considerably. Now it's still incredibly expensive to launch stuff into space, but it's slightly less incredibly expensive than if you had to construct a brand new launch vehicle for every single launch. And this might have the first time anyone had used a first stage rocket a second time. SpaceX designed the Falcon nine launch rocket to return to Earth and land upright and intact after a use to allow for this, and you may remember when SpaceX was able to bring back a first stage rocket and land it successfully, that first one they did, they retired. They did not plan on using it again. It was more of a proof of concept that this could actually work. And then after that they started to really work on practical ones that they would be able to use repeatedly, and this was the first case of that. So that's pretty darn cool. Also in March, Uber's contentious year continued as one of its autonomous vehicles got involved in an accident in Arizona. The company suspended all its self driving vehicle test operations, which were at that point taking place in San Francisco, Arizona, and Pittsburgh. San Francisco's cars were the first to get moving again just a few days after the accident. This was a tough time for Uber because they had just managed to to resecure permission in San Francisco to operate autonomous vehicles in they had encountered a problem where the city said, hey, you failed to fill out the proper paperwork and get the proper licenses to be able to do what you are doing, So this was the second setback for them. Police, however, stated that the Uber vehicle was not at fault in the accident, in fact, was the fault of the other driver, and also in March, the president of Uber, Jeff Joe Owns, stepped down from the company. In a statement to the press, Jones said, quote, the beliefs and approach to leadership that have guided my career are inconsistent with what I saw and experienced at Uber, and I can no longer continue as president of the ride sharing business. End quote. This was another indicator that perhaps those accusations Fowler had levied earlier had some merit to them, and that there were other problems going on over in Uber's business. For the president to actually resign and not be asked to resign, he stepped down because he felt that it was not a good fit for him. That was another big red flag for Uber. Also in March, after months of being absent from Oculus events, Palmer Lucky left Facebook and thus Oculus. Now. Lucky was the creator of the Oculus rift. He had made headlines in sixteen for his involvement in groups that supported Trump's president sidential campaign, and that group used trollish strategies to antagonize people with opposing viewpoints. That's a kind way of putting it. There was a lot of hate messaging out of this group, and Palmer Lucky had been financially supporting the group, which led to a lot of developers deciding to leave the Oculus platform out of protest. Palmer Lucky had given an apology and said that his actions in no way reflected the company, but uh Facebook, which is extremely cognizant of its public relations, decided that palmer Lucky or at least apparently decided that Palmer Lucky probably should not be at various official events. In fact, Lucky was absent at the Oculus Developers Conference, which was a notable absence considering the fact that he's the guy who made it in the first place, and so his departure, while not a big surprise, had came after months of him being essentially out of the public ie. Moving on to April, Tesla announced a new type of solar panel for house rooftops that looks like a high end roof shingle. They are very pretty. They're also very expensive. Uh Tesla says, well, they're not more expensive than other roof tiles of this type, but they are roof tiles that essentially very well off people would use to tile their houses. They're not like the shingles that you would get at your local hardware store so that you could do a d I Y shingle repair on your roof. It's definitely more expensive than that, but they are very attractive. So it's possibly a step toward more solar panels and solar power in various markets. I just feel like it's gonna be markets where people already have a ton of disposable income rather than uh, you know, a standard type of of home construction moving forward. But still every advance is a good one in a roll. Yek Yak, which is a location based anonymous messaging app, shut down now. At its height, yik Yak was worth four hundred million dollars. When it's shut down, the company sold off assets in the form of its engineering talent, for one million dollars. The service had been the target of much criticism as people argued that it encouraged cruelty and gossip among its user base, which was primarily college students that's to whom yek Yak was marketed. Many people were concerned that the app put vulnerable populations at risk and that it could lead to mob mentality in some communities. And there were also many concerns that younger people might get on the app and be exploited or otherwise harmed. Now, and just so you guys know, I once chaired a panel discussion with the apps founders at a south By Southwest. I walked away from that feeling uncertain about the experience. I wasn't entirely comfortable with how things had unfolded, and so it didn't surprise me when this happened. The app now is a thing of the past. It doesn't exist. In fact, the blog post that was the farewell doesn't exist either, because I was going to go there and quote some of it, but it's gone, and I didn't use archive dot org to look at an old one. But yep, yek yek is no more. Well. That brings us up to Mayen. But that means I've gotten through the first four months of the year. So I'm gonna take a little break and thank our sponsors. All Right, we're up to Mayen. That's when a malware known as Wanna cry begins to infect computers around the world, locking the computer contents away. Now, this type of malware falls under the category known as ransomware. Typically, ransomware will infect a computer. It will encrypt part of a computer's hard drive or the whole darn thing and lock off the contents from users. So you log into your computer and suddenly you can't access any of your data because it's all been encrypted. There's usually some sort of communication to the victim that gives instruction on how to earn back the access to your own data. Normally that includes paying some sort of ransom, usually in a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, to an account that's associated with the hackers. The Wanna cry virus specifically targeted Microsoft Windows machines, taking advantage of a vulnerability in the operating system. As the story developed, news broke that the US National Security Agency or n s A had discovered that same vulnerability and designed its own exploit before Wanna cry appeared on the scene. In fact, there were some allegations that perhaps the authors of Wanna cry were able to create Wanna cry because some of the n s A stuff got leaked in a in a big data dump earlier in the year. This raised some questions about the n s AS ethics, which many argued the agency had a responsibility to report this vulnerability to Microsoft, but instead they chose to keep it for themselves. A security researcher named Marcus Hutchins discovered a u r L that acted as a kill switch for the malware and that helped restrict the effects of Wanna Cry. It did infect hundreds of thousands of computers, but it would have been even worse had it not been for this kill switch. This same security researcher was later arrested in August seventeen and charged with creating another type of malware called Chronos k r o o S, which was designed to steal online banking credentials. According to crebs On Security, which is an excellent blog if you've not checked it out, I recommended, Hutchens did seem to have a past in making malay just software up until around two thousand twelve or two thousand thirteen. At that point he seemed to have a change of heart and he started working diligently to uncover and counteract malware. Hutchens has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him, and his case is yet to be heard as of the recording of this podcast episode. As for Wanna Cry, experts suspect that it had its origins in North Korea, though officials from North Korea denied that the government had anything to do with the virus. However, if you're talking about North Korea and a virus and infecting the Internet, the most sort of most fingers have to point at the government because North Korea has the Internet pretty much locked down. Within the country. There's an intranet, but not very very limited access to the outside internet. Uh. North Korea does not necessarily want everyone to have access to the world's information. Now it's time to get back to Uber. Yep, we're not done with Uber yet. In May, Uber and Weymo began their court battles in earnest Now, Weymo is the self driving company. Self driving car company, I should say that spun off from Google's R and D department. An engineer who once worked at Weymo named Anthony Lewandowski. He worked there when it was still just part of Google, had left Google in UH sixteen. He founded a new company called Auto and Uber then acquired Auto O. T t O was the name of that company, and as a result, Lewandowski began to work for Uber. Now. Weymo, in its legal claim against Uber, said that Lewandowski had illegally downloaded fourteen thousand documents that belonged to Weymo, including proprietary trade secrets, and that therefore Uber was developing its own self driving car technology on trade secret information that was developed at Weymo, and Lewandowski was effectively a thief. This particular trial is still playing out as of the recording of this podcast, it has not been resolved. Uh. Uber did end up firing Lewandowski, who was still to this day as far as I know, taking the Fifth Amendment against self incrimination, so he's not really core. He's not really cooperating with investigators on this matter. But other developments have happened over the past few days, so I'm sure I will do a full story about weymo versus uber once this has concluded. Meanwhile, going into June, a different type of ransomware attack happened, this time in the Ukraine. This one was called Petya, which also takes advantage of that same exploit that the n s A identified with Microsoft Windows machines, so Petya and Wanna cry both were taking advantage of that same vulnerability. The attacks were traced back to a software update package of a Ukrainian tack preparation program that was very popular in the corporate world in the Ukraine. Suspicion fell on the company itself that made this software, but representatives of that company said no, no, no, we're victims as well, where it's not us. We didn't make this. It did infect our our software that we sold, but we didn't actually put it there. An investigation revealed that there was a compromised employee account, and suspicions pointed investigators towards Russian hackers. The same patch that was used to secure computers against Wanna cry would work against Petya, but as it turned out, many systems in the Ukraine and beyond had failed to install those patches, and so they ended up getting encrypted. In addition, the email provider post e O shut down the email addresses that were associated with the hacker demands, so there was no way to pay the ransom even if you wanted to, so some people had to completely just get rid of entire drives of information and including a hospital in West Virginia that had to just junk it's computer systems in order to rebuild. In June, Verizon completed its acquisition of Yahoo, so this has been going on since the end of sixteen. The price tag ended up being at around four point four eight billion dollars. Merissa Meyer, who had left Google to head Yahoo as CEO for about four and a half years, left the company with a reported twenty three million dollar severance package. Verizon created a new subsidiary company called Oath, under which Yahoo would join other assets like Huffington's Post. Now I've done an episode about Yahoo before, but I feel like I might need to revisit this and do a new episode and really dive into how the company meandered. Over the last several years. There were some massive data breaches which Yahoo failed to disclose for quite some time that did enormous damage to the company's reputation and affected millions of people, and Meyer, who at one time was looked at a as a possible savior of the company, became the target of a lot of criticism for her role in leading a company that seemed to fail completely in protecting its customers. Also that month, the European Union hit Google with a two point seven billion dollar fine after finding the company guilty of practicing anti competitive strategies in the world of online comparison shopping. Yikes. This was the largest fine levied for an antitrust case from a governing body, so they set a record. Amazon announced in June that it was moving to acquire the upscale grocery store chain Whole Foods. The deal was reported to be about thirteen point seven billion dollars, which is just shy of how much it costs to shop at Whole Foods for a week of groceries and hey, let's check in with Uber, shall he. So? In in June of CEO Travis Kalanik announced he would take a lead eve of absence. His departure would end up being permanent. The former CEO of Expedia, Dara kasro Shah, he became the new CEO of the company a couple of months later in August. He came into a company that was in crisis, not just from a rash of sexual harassment scandals that were still unresolved, but also there was these charges that law enforcement were levying against Uber, saying that the company had developed software specifically designed to help drivers evade law enforcement. This is something that the company is still dealing with today. Moving on into July, that's when hyper Loop one held its first full scale test of its technology. It happened on a test track in Nevada using an actual size vehicle, So there is like a full scale vehicle of what would end up being the types of transportation we would get into once the system is complete. However, no one was inside this test vehicle. The hyper loop one method relies on mag lev technology, which is different from the original hyper loop concept that Elon Musk talked about. Elon Musk's version used what he called air skis, so you would use uh, you pump air down kind of like a reverse air hockey table, and that would allow the pod to float above the surface of the tunnel, and then you might use magnets to propel it forward. But in this case, instead of using air skis, the hyper loop one method actually used magnetic levitation itself, so you're using permanent and electro magnets to repel against one another and thus levitate the pod above the surface of the track. Otherwise, it's very similar to elon Musk's original concept. The test had the pod elevate for about five seconds, not terribly long, but it did accelerate to about two gs, so that's twice the strength of gravity of Earth, so that's pretty impressive that it, you know, went to two g acceleration within five seconds. July was also when Adobe announced its plan for terminating flash software. It's going to be a gradual death with the end of distribution and updates not scheduled until twenty so it's gonna be around a few more years. That's supposed to give content creators the time they need to move their work over to a more secure platform like HTML five rather than the relatively vulnerable and venerable flash program or platform, I should say. China announced that it had completed a and connected a massive floating solar farm. The farm itself is on top of a flooded region that once used to mine coal, so that's kind of cool. Also, the pictures of this massive floating solar farm are really impressive. It also marks another example of how the nation of China is working on being a global leader in renewable energy. Elon Musk in July tweeted that he had received a verbal go ahead from the White House to begin a huge project that would connect Washington, d C. With New York via an underground tunnel, presumably using hyperlop like technology to transport people between the cities at high speeds so that you could get between them in like half an hour. Must get introduced a new company called the Boring Company. Boring as in digging or tunneling. That is, the plan is to use massive digging machines, which by the way, work at a pace that's slower than a snail. That's absolutely true, in order to dig these tunnels between an under cities. In an effort to revolutionize transportation. In November sev a White House advisor said that disapproval was not official or a green light for the project at all, that this verbal agreement was more like verbal excitement, and even if it had been a verbal agreement, such an undertaking would involve many more governmental bodies at the state and city and county levels, so it's not exactly signed, sealed, and delivered. That month, Microsoft announced it would also layoff around three thousand employees in an effort to reorganize the company and focus more on cloud based services, thus showing a massive shift in Microsoft strategy. Now we get into August, a string of resignations on various United States White House Economic councils made headlines that month. Executives from many companies, including big ones in the tech sector, handed in resignation letters citing differences of philosophy with the President of the United States, and among those who left these councils were Jeff Emilt, who was the chairman of General Electric, Brian Krasnick, the CEO of Intel, Windell Weeks, the CEO of Corning, and more, Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, and Bob Iger of the Walt Disney Company had already left in June. Travis Kalanik, who was the former CEO of Uber, we talked about just minute ago. Uh. Of course, he had his own laundry list of problems to handle throughout seventeen. He left the Strategic Policy Council all the way back in February, but August marked as sort of a mass resignation for various councils and mostly consisted of prominent business leaders. Over at Google, an engineer named James Demore released a memo that argued against Google's employee diversity measures. The memo protested several of Google's initiatives that were aimed to create an inclusive environment, particularly for women. Demore's memo made headlines, and Google was quick to act. They fired the more in the wake of the news, and among the elements of the memo that riled up the text fear were his hypotheses that the gender gap in tech exists not because there's been an historic resistance and sometimes pervasive hostility toward women entering the tech field, but that biological differences between the sexes were to blame. Reaction to Demore's firing has also been across the board but there's actually a pretty large group of folks who feel that while he may have been expressing a point of view or two Google's culture, it wasn't necessarily something that in itself should have been a fire a bowl offense. And this is across the board. It's not one side or the other that argues is a lot of people say maybe firing him might have been going too far, But from Google's perspective, they were pointing out that this was a very disruptive point of view and it was difficult to deal with in a constructive way. Disney made an announcement in August that it was going to acquire a company called bam Tech, a streaming video company that's behind services like HBO Now and the ones that Major League Baseball and the NHL use. Disney also announced its own video streaming strategy, which will consist of its own service, and this will mean that it's going to start phasing titles off of other platforms such as Netflix over the next couple of years. Microsoft would show off some mixed reality headsets, which are meant to bring augmented reality to the general consumer. The company works with hardware manufacturers to make a platform for are hardware applications, and Lee Jay Young, one of the heirs to the Samsung fortune, received a five year prison sentence for being found guilty of bribery and embezzlement. Now to hear more about the crazy stories involving Samsung's ruling family, check out the series of episodes I did on the company earlier this year. All right, we are two thirds of the way through. We still got the last little bit of the year to get through. But before I jump into that, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Okay, September, we're in the home stretch. Boiler stuff happened. In September. Apple held its annual press event, in which it unveiled new products, including the iPhone eight and the iPhone ten, which once again reinforce the idea that's really tough to be the number nine in the tech world. Apple skipped it. Microsoft skipped it with the wind Nose platform. The iPhone ten, so called because it's ten years after the original iPhone, features a super retina display, facial recognition technology that has come under fire recently for alleged vulnerabilities, and a design that makes the phone look like it's just a really attractive screen and that's it. And by that, I mean it's impressive that it looks like it's just a screen. It's also pretty expensive, with the starting price of nine ninety nine dollars. Now, one of the stories that has spanned much of seventeen was the sixteen election and the involvement of Russian influence upon it at different levels, from charges of fraudulent ads to more direct attempts to influence the outcome of the election. We've seen multiple accusations fly, we've seen denials, we've seen investigations. In September, Facebook reported that Russian operatives had spent around one thousand dollars in fraudulent ads to throw support toward Donald Trump during the election season. Twitter and Google revealed that their investigation has found similar evidence of clandestine involvement. And this has brought up a lot of tough questions about how the United States and companies within it can make certain that foreign parties can't exert such direct influence over American voters. It's been pretty ugly and it's still a story that is unfolding even as I record right now. But yeah, that's been a lot of fun. A related story by the way is the whole concept of fake news. The term has been used to describe false stories that only have the goal of influencing behaviors or reinforcing beliefs without relying on actual facts, and in general promoting one perspective over others without regard for honesty. And you can find examples of this for different ideology. So I want to be clear, I'm not singling out any one side over another. You can find examples for either the right side or the left side. There they're examples of both. But it also became a rallying cry for anyone who takes you with any news article or report with which they disagree. So in other words, you don't agree with something, you call it those fake news, and that's the extent of your argument. That's also kind of awful, not kind of it's just awful. Another huge story that broke in September centered on Equifax talked about awful. This is a consumer credit reporting agency. The company revealed that hackers had managed to exploit a vulnerability and Equifax's web systems, and they gained access to millions of customers data records in one of the worst data breaches in history. More than a hundred forty three million people were affected by this. The company's former CEO, who stepped down in light of this controversy, was brought before the United States Congress to explain what had happened, and while the story broke in September, the actual events dated back further. In twenty seventeen, the former CEO revealed that the Department of Homeland Security alerted Equifax to the presence of a vulnerability in the Apache struts software package, which was used in equifaxes Online Disputes Portal, which is where consumers could dispute credit report items. Let's say you see something in your credit report that doesn't belong there, you would go online and use this particular portal so that you could file a claim. Well, according to company policy, Equifax was supposed to patch all instances of this software in their systems within forty eight hours. That's company policy. That wasn't you know, a law or anything. They just said, if we find a vulnerability, it is our responsibility to fix it within forty eight hours. But for some reason that didn't happen. So the first detected intrusion into EQUIFAXES systems happened in early May seventeen. Now, remember they found out about those vulnerabilities in March, so more than a month later. That's when they first detect an intrusion. And these intrusions continued through June, and it wouldn't until September that Equifax would actually announce anything. So several months before anyone outside of the company learned of this potentially devastating data breach. It did not win Equifax any new fans. Oh. Also, that month, Uber got banned in London. You didn't forget about Uber, did you? Actually? To be more accurate, Uber was told that it's licensed to operate in the city would expire on September and the city would not renew that license. However, the company would be allowed to continue to operate within the City of London while appealing this decision. Many issues led to that decision, not the least of which was this scandal involving Uber's technology that allegedly allowed drivers to evade law enforcement. So what's the status now? Well, in November, the Mayor of London said the appeals process could quote go on for a number of years end quote So Pip, Pip Gueri, Oh, I guess A side note, Anthony Lewandowski, the former Google employee at the heart of the way Moos slash uber Legal Battle, founded a tech based religion in September. He claims to want to create an artificially intelligent godhead for humans to worship, one which will make decisions for people and generally guide humanity. And yes, I will do a full episode on this concept in the future, because how could I not. That moves us to October Now. A year earlier, back in the little company Snapchat, the social network that everybody envies, debuted a consumer electronics gadget called Spectacles. Now, these were sunglasses that incorporated a camera, and the camera could take photos and video and upload them to a user's Snapchat. Well, when these glasses first premiered in they were a hot commodity. You would have these pop up vending machines that would be installed in different places in Trindy cities and major markets, and and techno hipsters eager to be one of the elite would line up for hours to buy a pair. You flash forward a year later and the story is very different. In October, the Information, a journal, published an article detailing the sad state of affairs for Snapchat. There are now hundreds of thousands of unsold spectacles. Some of them are not yet assembled, others are ready to ship immediately if only there were any customers to buy them. The company admitted later in November that it had spent nearly forty million dollars on quote excess inventory reserves and inventory purchase commitment cancelation charges end quote. These unmoved units are literally costing the company millions of dollars hashtag no filter. Just in time for Halloween, security researchers announced that there was a vulnar ability in WiFi technology. That's awful. It all has to do with w P, a to encryption protocol for WiFi. Users are told they should update their firmware on their routers and client devices as patches become available. But yeah, not great when the underlying encryption technology that is meant to protect an entire form of communications ends up having a critical vulnerability. Not good at all. Microsoft officially ended manufacturing on the Connect Xbox peripheral in October. The motion sensing device had been popular among hackers for all sorts of interesting applications, but had failed to really catch on with gamers. Now whether this was due to the hardware itself or a widely lamented lack of content. It didn't really matter. Microsoft just decided to pull the plug. Now, this did not really come as a surprise because more recent versions of the Xbox One have shipped without a dedicated connect port on the console itself, so the writing was kind of on the wall. But in October it became official. Amazon announced a new program called Key, which would allow customers to authorize delivery personnel to enter their homes and deliver packages while they are away. I don't think i'd be comfortable doing that. I'd rather the box be left on my porch and I just have to hope nobody steals it rather than having an Amazon person coming into my house to drop off a package. But maybe that's just me. November. Early that month, US President Donald Trump had a brief snaff who with his Twitter account. It disappeared, it was deactivated, it was gone, seemingly deleted, and it was so for about eleven minutes, then it returned. It so happens that a Twitter customer support employee decided to deactivate the President's Twitter account on their last day at the company as a defiant gesture. Twitter and now as a result of that action, the company would do a full internal review and make changes to avoid having any one employee having that power ever again. But boy, that definitely got Twitter conversations going due to those eleven minutes. Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that has had incredible ups and downs throughout its entire existence, started off seventeen worth a little less than a thousand dollars per bitcoin. In November of seventeen, the value of bitcoin topped ten thousand dollars for the first time ever. The morning that I'm recording this had the value of a single bitcoin listed at twelve thousand, eight hundred seventy three dollars and ninety nine cents. There have been so many stories about bitcoin in twenty seventeen, tons of them. Several journals reported on lost bitcoin that are likely never to be recovered. The design of bitcoin necessitates that there is a finite number that will ever be released to the world. That number is twenty one million bitcoin, and the release happens over time through a process called mining. Bitcoin are stored as data, and if you lose the devices that contain that data, it's like you just lost a wallet full of money. According to a study cited by The Independent, around three point seven nine million bitcoin may be lost in such a way, which means a loss of many billions of dollars worth of bitcoin. One guy named James Howells says he alone lost seven thousand, five hundred bitcoin by accidentally throwing away a hard drive that had his bitcoin supply stored on it. At twelve thousand dollars a pop, seven thousand, five hundred bitcoins is an astounding amount of wealth. Numerous financial experts have debated about whether or not there's going to be a bitcoin bubble burst, like is a crash coming, When might it happen and how bad is it going to be. Some state that the currency is destined for a massive collapse. Others argue there's no real grounds for that prediction. Bitcoin's value has certainly fluctuated over the years, so we'll likely see some big changes over time, but the currency has stuck around so far. YouTube began to face harsh criticism for its YouTube Kids service, which is supposed to serve up age appropriate material for kids to enjoy, but was having issues with people slipping in videos that were at best questionable and at worst wildly inappropriate for the service. Part of the problem is just the sheer amount of material being added to YouTube every moment. It's an estimated four hundred hours of content every single minute. At that rate, it's very difficult to vet everything and make sure it passes muster. So YouTube is now under pressure to design a system that more effectively filters out inappropriate content. Tesla Motors merged with the solar provider company Solar City for an estimated two point six billion dollars. Solar City was founded by some of Elon Musk's relatives and has a close relationship with the batteries that Tesla produces, but not every thing was sonny for Tesla Motors. In seventeen, the company missed its ship date for the Model three Tesla, and on November one reported that it wouldn't hit the five thousand units per week number the company had promised until late q one. The company cited unspecified production bottlenecks as the reason for the delay initially, but in a later shareholder letter more details emerged. According to that letter, the major delay came from the quote battery module assembly line at Giga Factory one, where cells are packaged into modules in the quote. The letter went on to explain the complexity of the design required more time to manufacture and as symbol than engineers had anticipated. The delays came with more than just the cost of not moving units. Investors filed a lawsuit against Tesla, alleging that the executives had deliberately hidden the nature of these delays from investors in an attempt to preserve the company's value. Oh And the company also faced law suits from workers claiming to have experienced discrimination at the Fremont, California plant, claims that Tesla representatives have been quake to deny. David carp, the founder of Tumbler, announced he would leave the company after eleven years of working there. Yahoo had purchased Tumbler back in two thousand thirteen for one billion dollars. By March of twenty sixteen, Yahoo had to write off that purchase, essentially saying the whole thing was lost. The Tumbler acquisition is one of the decisions that critics of Merissa Meyers say led to the downfall of Yahoo. Uber YEP, We're back to Them continued its tumultuous year with yet another scandal. In late November, news broke that Uber Systems had been the target of hackers in sixteen. Further that the hackers were able to access and steal customer data in that attack, and worse yet, the head of Uber's security department, Joe Sullivan, had authorized payments to the hackers to the tune of one hundred thousand dollars in an effort to cover the whole thing up. In the wake of his firing, more details about his practices came to light that didn't seem terribly ethical. He allegedly told employees to quote use ephemeral messaging apps in the quote as an applications that do not save threads and delete all the contents after a certain amount of time. According to a former Uber employee, this was to make sure we didn't create a paper trail that would come back to haunt the company in any potential criminal or civil litigation. Yikes, alright, home stretch, We're in December, and uh, you know, I haven't covered a nasty hostile takeover story in a long time. So in early December, a company called broad Calm started to take the earliest steps toward a hostile takeover of the company qual Calm. Qualcom makes semiconductors and telecommunications equipment It also has a healthy business in licensing various patents. The company holds broad Calm, which used to be known as e Vago Technologies, makes stuff that uses semi conductors and try uses. Its history back to being part of Hewitt Packard. Broadcom had sidled up to Qualcom and offered to buy the company for a reported a hundred three billion dollars in stocks and cash. Qualcom turned down this initial offer, so now Broadcom has nominated eleven people to the board of Qualcom in an effort to get the supported needs to make the acquisition. Because Qualcom is a publicly traded company, it must answer to stockholders. Broadcom's hope is to convince those stockholders that their investment will be more valuable should Qualcom join Broadcom's umbrella. The stockholders have the ability to elect the nominees Broadcom put forward. According to Broadcom representatives, stockholders already want this deal to be in place, They've just been blocked by Qualcom's board of directors. This story will continue to unfold in eighteen as the next shareholder meeting for Qualcom isn't until March of that year. Musician Neil Young made nearly all of his music available online through a streaming service called x stream, which will send the highest quality audio stream to a user based on that users bandwidth. If you have a wicked fast connection, you will presumably have a more rich experience musically speaking. The music is free to listen to until June, whereupon it turns into a subscription based service. It's interesting to see another streaming service pop up because there's already a ton of them available, but arguing for sound quality might be enough to set it apart from its competitors. Lift, the other big right hailing service, recently launched a test autonomous car service in the Boston support area. The cars still have a human operator behind the wheel, though, so it's not entirely driverless yet. The cars themselves were created by a company called New Autonomy, so if you're in the Boston area, you might be able to get a ride from a car that drives itself. Valve, about which I did a full podcast series, recently said December that it would stop accepting bitcoin in Steam because of how wildly the value of the currency fluctuates. Valves stated that even in the process of a single transaction, the value of bitcoin could change significantly enough to cause major problems. So you might determine that something is worth point zero zero zero eight bitcoin, but then the value of bitcoin changes so much that you end up overpaying or under paying for that particular project. And Valve said, this just isn't working, and they pulled the plug. By the time this episode goes live, the f c C will have held a vote on whether to overturn the decision made by the former leaders of the f c C to reclassify Internet service providers as a common carrier. Since this has not yet happened. As a record this episode, I can only give a guess as to how it turned out, and my guess is that they did indeed overturn that decision. I personally consider this the wrong path to take, as I feel that without regulations, we will be in danger of facing a fractured, throttled Internet based on whatever I s P we use. But we'll see. That would be all the stories I have prepared, and obviously this is just a hint of the stuff that unfolded in. Some of the biggest stories are the ones that caught my attention, but there are so many others, and I have to give a shout out to my buddies over at daily tech news show. That'd be Tom Merritt and Sarah Lane in particular. They cover this kind of technology news every single day. I highly recommend you check out their show so that you can keep up to date on news. And I relied very heavily on their past episodes, the episodes they did for to pull some of the big stories for this particular episode of tech Stuff. But it's okay, Tom and Sarah and I know each other, so it's all cool. I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. I look forward to the next couple of episodes. Next one will be how did we do with Predictions for and then the one following that will be predictions for eighteen, which I'm I'm honestly not looking forward to because I should have learned my lesson by now. But once you establish a tradition, it's really hard to stop. If you guys have suggestions for topics that I should absolutely cover in the year two thousand eighteen, then I recommend you get in touch with me and let me know what those suggestions are. You can write me the address is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle of both of those is text stuff hs W. Remember we have an Instagram account also text stuff hs W. And Hey, if you want to watch me record these things live, go to twitch dot tv slash tech stuff. Typically I record on Wednesdays and Fridays. You can see the schedule there. You can join in, be part of the chat room, and be up to all sorts of crazy shenanigans. That wraps us up for this year. I'll be wrapping up the predictions next making more predictions, and then we'll say farewell forever to be your two thousand and seventeen, and turn our eyes forward to two thousand eighteen, and I'll tell to you guys again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics, because it how stuff works. Dot com