The Verdict is in for Theranos

Published Jan 5, 2022, 12:17 AM

A jury returns a verdict on the case against Elizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos and it's a mixed bag. AT&T and Verizon both agree to delay 5G rollout, but only for a couple of weeks. And CES gets underway in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio. And how the tech are you? I'm gonna I'm gonna workshop that for a while. So it is time for the tech news for Tuesday, January four, twenty twenty two. Actually have to look at the date, because, as is the usual, it'll take me about a month to remember that we're actually in a new year. And let's get to the news. The trial of Elizabeth Holmes has concluded with a jury delivering the founder of Sara Nos a mixed bag of verdicts. So for those who don't know, Sara Nos was a biotech medical startup founded by Holmes with the aim of producing a desktop technology capable of running more than a hundred medical tests on a single micro drop of blood. The company raised somewhere in the neighborhood of nine billion dollars in investments and turned homes into a Silicon Valley celebrity. She also gained a lot of attention for seemingly emulating the late Steve Jobs, including adopting the black turtleneck as her signature look. While the company received a lot of attention and enthusiasm from investors who were sold on the prospect that this tech could disrupt the entire medical industry and represent a huge business, things were not going so well at the company itself. A Wall Street Journal expose a revealed that the company's promises stretched far beyond its capabilities and led to investigations that bring us up to this trial, Holmes had faced eleven criminal charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Of those, the jury found her not guilty on four accounts, guilty on another four accounts, and they couldn't come to a decision on the remaining three counts. The judge declared a mistrial in the case of those three counts. That means that technically prosecutors could bring a new case against Holmes. She could face up to twenty years in prison and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. I would not be surprised, however, if her lawyers appealed her case. Meanwhile, her business partner and former romantic interest, Ramesh Sunny Balwanni, who served as the chief operating officer for the company, is to stand trial facing similar criminal charges in February. Throughout the trial, Holmes maintained it was Balwanni who was at fault for the crimes. So this story isn't over over, but the initial trial is. It will be interesting to see what bal Wanne's arguments will be when that trial comes to pass. Okay, let's do a very quick round up on some news that has happened since we went on break, and I'm going to start with some news about politicians in the United States and social network platforms. First, there's the case of House Representative Marjorie Taylor Green from my state of Georgia. Now, I'm going to spare you my personal thoughts about Green, and I'll just say I believe there may be no position upon which the both of us agree. That's the classy way to say it, I guess. Anyway, Twitter recently permanently suspended Green's personal account it was a verified Twitter account, even after that account received at least five strikes for spreading misinformation about COVID nineteen. And y'all, my state's been hit pretty hard by COVID, So the fact that a rep from my own state is effectively working against her own constituents is just playing crazy anyway. Following that, Facebook removed a post from Green that was, you know, in light of this suspend mention, uh you know, Facebook also removed a post saying that it also violated their policies. However, they said that Green Green's transgressions did not merit a full suspension from Facebook, so she's still active there. The move has prompted a total crap storm here in America, with some folks like Joe Rogan urging people to leave Twitter. On Moss and late night talk show hosts are rejoicing in her removal. So you know, that whole issue with the left and right growing further apart from each other is just going swimmingly well in my country. Anyway. Green isn't the only conservative to part ways with a social network, though. I should also add that her official account as a representative for Georgia remains active, so her personal account has been suspended, but she does still have access to her you know, official account as a representative of the House of Representatives. Anyway. U S Senator Ran Paul, another Conservative, has left YouTube, but this time it's Paul's decision sort of see light Green Paul was dinged for spreading misinformation about the COVID pandemic, and his account was suspended by YouTube on two separate occasions. Paul now says he will no longer post to YouTube unless it's two dunk on them, and otherwise he will post his messages on other places, going on to tell conservatives that because they make up about half the country, they could put a real hurt on networks like YouTube just by not using those those platforms. I'm not sure how persuasive that argument actually is, either to YouTube or to is, you know, the people he's speaking to. I do know it's pretty disgusting to make arguments about freedom of speech when that speech in question is all about spreading misinformation that consequently leads to people getting sick and dying. Uh. I think that is pretty abhorrent. Something else that happened over the break was the successful launch of the James web Space Telescope. According to NASA, the mission so far has progressed as smoothly as could be hoped, which must be a relief after the numerous delays that pushed back the telescope's launch multiple times, including that scary moment late last year when vibrations moved through the telescope as it was being attached to its launch vehicle. Uh, the telescope is so delicate that there was a concern that those vibrations could have misaligned things, which means that the process of the telescope unpacking itself could have been, you know, compromised. So it is currently on its way to its destination, which will take it beyond the moon, and teams are working on the process by which the telescope will unpack and unfold itself. That includes unfolding a five layer sun shield layer by layer, and each layer is about as thick as a human hair. And also you've got all those numerous mirrors that will reflect light to the telescope's sensors. According to the BBC, the process has three separate quote single point failures end quote involved. Now that means that each of those points represents a moment where if things don't go well, then nothing that follows that step will work. So it's kind of like if your plan is to go out and go shopping and then you want to go catch a movie, and then you're gonna go out to dinner, but as you leave the house you find out your car has just been crushed by a meteor. Well, that medior crushing your car was kind of the single point of failure because none of the rest of your plans are going to work out because your cars been crushed. Same sort of idea. However, NASA reps have stressed that there's no reason to be tense about this, that they've practiced this numerous times, they know what they're doing, and the whole procedure is likely to be boring. That's actually their words, and you know what, after years of setbacks, boring actually sounds kind of nice. While the James Webb is in many ways the successor to the venerable Hubble space telescope, that does not mean the Hubble is done with adding to our scientific knowledge. Recently, NASA released an image captured by the Hubble telescope showing the spiral galaxy in GC one oh five aligning with a second galaxy. And because it's impossible to really judge depth just by looking at a two dimensional image, the first impression you might have is that what we're looking at is two galaxies colliding with one another. Now, that kind of thing does happen, but in this case, the image shows the galaxies are just lining up from our perspective, kind of like how Mars can line up with Jubiter. It doesn't mean Mars is crashing into Jubiter, just means that from our perspective they're in line with each other. It's a pretty cool image, which you can see on NASA's website about the Hubble. And while we're talking about space, I have a fun story that involves satellites and one of the Internet's favorite topics. Not bacon because that pretty much fizzled out like five years ago. I'm talking about cats. Okay, So space Sex has this project called Starlink, and this uses tiny satellites in orbit to provide satellite internet connections down here on Earth. They're running a relatively small beta program right now in a pretty uh constricted region to test it out. So right now, the star Link network consists of slightly fewer than two thousand satellites, so there are a lot up there, uh, and the company plans to add more than twelve thousand additional ones in the future. So the goal is to provide internet service to rural and underserved regions areas that cannot get reliable internet access otherwise. All right, Well, that's all the stuff that's zooming around in space, but down here on Earth, you need a way to pick up those satellite signals. You have to have a way to beam information back and forth between the satellites so that you can you know, Internet good. So you need an antenna and it's a dish antenna, what we used to call us satellite dish back in the day. Well, the Starlink dish antenna has a kind of nifty feature. So essentially it has a thermometer and it can detect if the temperature drops below freezing and if it does, the satellite dish will generate a little extra heat surface heat on the antenna itself. So the idea is that that heat will help melt any snow or ice that would otherwise build up on the dish in freezing temperatures and could potentially interfere with getting a satellite signal. And here's where the cats come in. A Twitter user named Aaron Taylor shared an image of a group of five cats perched on top of the Starlink satellite dish, presumably outside of Aaron's home, stating quote, starlink works great until the cats find out that the dish gives off a little heat on cold day's end. Quote. Trust me, the image is adorable and also very funny. All right, we've got some more news stories to go through, but before we get to that, let's take a quick break and we're back. US telecom companies A, T and T and Verizon recently agreed to delay their planned rollout of five G systems by a couple of weeks uh this The request of delay came from the United States Federal Aviation Administration or f a A, which sites concerns that five G signals could interfere with some airplane systems, notably stuff like a radio altimeter. There's been a lot of back and forth between the aviation industry and the telecom industry about the effects of delays as well as the potential effects of five G transmissions. The telecom companies are eager to move forward and deploy their five G networks. They really want to make good on certain promises they have with customers, as well as just to remain competitive with companies that have already started to deploy five gen networks. And obviously they've also been experiencing delays anyway due to problems like COVID and of course, the aviation industry is concerned with safety and avoiding problems like flights getting delayed, canceled, or diverted, saying that if there is this UH interference, then that could severely hamper flight flight control, and that would not be great like flight control in the sense of everything could get messed up. And once you start having flights canceled at one airport, there's this cascade effect, right because that plane was on its way somewhere and now it's not going to get there at that time. So this ends up having like a domino effect, even if you have airports that are not being affected by this interference. So up until yesterday, A T and T and Verizon appeared unwilling to give up their rollout plans, but that has changed and now they've agreed to a two week delay. I'm not sure what difference the two weeks makes, but I will continue to look into the story as it develops. In a serious case of deja vous, Microsoft has had to release a fix for a bug in their Exchange server product that shut down on premises email delivery at thousands of locations around the world. So what happened, Well, it's all because Exchange Server two thousand sixteen and Exchange Server two thousand nineteen have a date check feature, and that date check has a maximum value of to one four seven four eight three six four seven. If I were to read that out, it would be two billion, one hundred forty seven million, four hundred eight three thousand, six hundred forty seven, also known as two to the thirty first power of minus one. But Microsoft would use the first two digits of that number, the T one in this case. What that's the maximum? They would use those first two digits to denote the last two digits of the current year, which you know, that works fine as long as the last two digits of the current year are not greater than to one. And uh, the first two digits in the number are you know, that's as high as they can go as to one. Well, I'm told this year is two thousand, twenty two, so we would use twenty two to designate the year. That means if you put two two at the end, you know, the front end of that very long number, it's actually outside the range allowed. So when midnight rolled over from New Year's Eve to New Year's Day, the systems attempted to verify a date designated as to to zero one zero one zero zero zero one, and on premises, email servers looked at that and said, oh, heck no, I don't get paid enough to deal with numbers bigger than I can handle. And they quit, or rather they crashed. Meanwhile, I t professionals around the world, We're trying to suss out why the heck their email servers were going offline. Microsoft had a fix ready to go on January second. So that's some pretty serious hustle right there. But that fix has to be initiated it on every single server running Exchange two thousand sixteen or Exchange two thousand nineteen in order to get them working again. And that deja vue, I said, I felt, well. That refers to the old y two K panic, in which programmers around the world hurriedly tried to fix millions of lines of code to account for the fact that the year was going to change from nineteen nine or just ninety nine to two thousand or zero zero. The fear was that by going from zero zero, computer systems would just assume that we had somehow flip back to nineteen hundred. I've done whole episodes about this. So anyway, this does seem to be pretty similar in history has a tendency to repeat itself, and I blame the conventions we used to denote what the date is. C e S is about to go into full swings starting tomorrow, January five. Several high profile companies had pulled out of appearing in person at the event, citing concerns about COVID. But the show must go on, according to the Consumer Technology Association, that's the group that organizes the huge trade show, and we're hearing about some of the stuff that's going to be shown off at the event. One of those things is the new Eco remote from Samsung. Last year, Samsung introduced the first Eco remote, which has a small solar panel on it, so you can actually recharge your your remote batteries by you know, leaving it in the sunlight. This year, Samsung has also incorporated radio frequency harvesting capabilities, meaning that the remote has a small antenna inside it and it can pick up radio frequency waves from your home's WiFi network and then convert those radio frequency waves to electricity, and that electricity can go towards charging the battery. Now, I'm sure lots of people will liken this idea to that of Nikola Tesla, the one you know he had talked about transmating electricity through the air more than a century ago. Here's the thing, this is the basis for a lot of wireless charging technology, and radio itself actually works on a very similar principle. Anyway, Samsung's move is to get away from the use of triple A batteries, and using a rechargeable battery could mean cutting down on a great deal of waste over time, which I think is a pretty good thing to aim for. In other ce s, news Wired reports that a company called Smarty Pair has introduced Leo's LU two. And if you don't know what that is, where the heck have you been. So it's a smart cat litter box. Yep, it's a self cleaning cat litter box that also monitors stuff like your cat's weight and you know how frequently your furry little friend is heading to the toilets and you can access the information with an app. Now, I know that on the surface of it that might sound like crazy, but that's actually really useful information to have if you need to, say, talk to a vet about your cats health. So while on the surface, This might seem like overkill or perhaps you know, a gross in vage asian of your kitty cats privacy. It's actually a pretty smart idea for those who want to make sure their pets are healthy. Also, it is compatible with Alexa and um a an assistant at rhymes with schmoogle. I don't say it because I actually have a smart speaker in this room, and when I tried to do it before, it activated and interrupted my recording, so this is technically the second take of the sentence. Anyway, My point is that the cat smart cat litter boxes also compatible with those you know, the virtual assistance, so you can control settings on the cat litter box using those devices. It also has a UV radiation method of sanitizing the cat litter box. It also has sensors that can detect when a cat is nearby, so it doesn't just automatically turn on and scare your kitty cat. So kind of a neat idea. I don't own any cats, and I frequently smack my head when I run into smart appliances, thinking that they might go a little too far or be a little ridiculous. But I actually can see the use for this one, so while it on the surface made me laugh, the more I thought about, the more I thought, no, wait, that's kind of a practical use. T. S. Eliot would be proud, and I'm sure we'll have a lot more to say about C E S later in the week. So on Thursday, I'll try and do a roundup of some of the more interesting things that were shown off during the event. In the meantime, I'll be glad that I am covering it from my home rather than in Las Vegas. Well, we've got a little bit more news to cover, but before we get to that, let's take another quick break. Okay, international news. The German Minister of Justice announced that the country is moving to abolish any data retention from telecommunications activities if there are no good reasons for holding onto that information, or rather that the minister is inclined to do as much. The minister said, quote I reject data retention without any reason and would like to remove it from the law once and for all. It violates fundamental rights end quote. This would be bring German law more in line with European Union law, so a lot of the stuff that is in German law is superseded by EU law. Anyway, So a lot of the elements about data retention have been suspended, and this is really more of a move to just say, let's go ahead and make it our law as well, not just EU law. But it also means that if there is a specific and presumably legitimate reason to retain data that would still be on the table, you would still be allowed to do that. But should the Minister's desire be made into law, it would be illegal under German law for companies to collect any and all data and just store it indefinitely while possibly just waiting around for a way to exploit that information. This actually reminds me of the early days of smartphone apps, in which app stores did not place restrictions on developers, and developers could essentially create any kind of app that could collect all sorts of data, not just the information that the app needed to do whatever it was it was doing. So, for example, you might download a game on your smartphone and it turns out that it's also tracking your location and you know, all this other stuff uh in the background without your knowledge. And in the early days that was kind of you know, just it was happening, and it wasn't until you know, Schmoogle and Apple really started to crack down on that and say no, you can only get access to the data that your app actually needs to work, and you have to ask permission first. It's only when that happened when we started to see this change. In fact, this was kind of what was at the heart of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. But we're seeing a rejection of that practice in many places as there is a growing concern that this data could be abused and it could violate the privacy of citizens and consumers. Over in China, the government has continued the suspension of new game licenses within the country, and this means that app developers who are working on games intended for various platforms are kind of stuck. The government requires anyone who is developing a game or updating a game to first acquire a license to sell games within China, so with this suspension, there's effectively a halt on all new game developers within the country. Apparently, this has led to nearly a hundred fifty thousand small game studios to shut down because there's just there's no way for them to operate a business without obtaining a license, and all licenses are currently suspended all new licenses. That is, the suspension actually began last year, but a lot of people were hoping that China would lift it by two and instead it appears to be set to continue at least in you know, in the near future, possibly indefinitely. As for why there's suspension in the first place, the government has not issued a formal explanation, but the general guess is that this ties into the government's campaign to battle what it calls a gaming addiction. The government has previously passed laws that restrict the amount of time young people are allowed to spend playing games, so it's probably tied in with that. Again, there hasn't been an official explanation. Car manufacturing company hun Day has ended all development on internal combustion engine vehicles, shifting engineers over to develop new electric vehicles also known as e vs. Engineers will refocus to develop new electric power trains for cars, and the move makes sense. More and more countries are setting deadlines in which all new vehicles sold within those countries will have to be electric vehicles at some date, and this is on an effort to cut back on CEO two emissions and meet global deadlines. In the fight against climate change. The general thought is that, uh, you will still be allowed to sell used vehicles that are internal combustion engine vehicles, but no new cars on the market will be allowed to be I sees. They have to be electric vehicles or possibly hybrids. Um, that's that's kind of the play here. Now, one thing that has been part of the conversation around this switch to electric vehicles is whether they are actually more quote unquote green than internal combustion engine vehicles. Now, it's obvious that a gasoline or diesel powered engine is going to generate emissions and an electric vehicle isn't. Right, evs don't generate emissions, But then you have to take in the bigger picture, like the manufacturing processes, and then you have ask okay, well, does it still make sense our e vs still more environmentally friendly than combustion engine vehicles or is the process to build e vs more harmful than operating a fleet of gas powered cars. Well, the International Council on Clean Transportation recently released a report that shows producing a medium sized gas powered car would create around seven point two tons of carbon emissions. That's just the manufacturing process. Building a similarly sized electric vehicle creates nine point to carbon emissions, so an ev would generate two more tons of c O two in the production process than an internal combustion car. Most of that comes from the production of the e VS battery. It's a carbon intensive process. However, the same study found that a car in England would make up for that carbon debt and electric car after driving just seven thousand, sixty one miles. In the UK and in England, the average distance traveled per year for the first three years of a new car is ten thousand, four hundred miles each, So, in other words, for the first three years of owning a new car, the average person is driving ten thousand, four hundred miles per year. That means that the production side of evs is front loaded with carbon emissions. It does generate more CEO two than building combustion engine cars. However, after just one year of use, the electric vehicle would be responsible for fewer carbon emissions than a gas powered car would, because, of course, the gas powered car continues to emit c O two as it's being operated. Of course, there are other factors that you have to bring into consideration as well, such as where the electricity that charged the EV's battery came from UH. This is why stuff like carbon emissions gets really tricky, because there's so many different factors to consider. But with more of an emphasis on renewable energy sources, the ecosystem for evs can be one that produces far less carbon than our old gas guzzlind ways. And that is the news for Tuesday, January two. We'll be back on Thursday with some more news, hopefully some more stuff about c e s. I'll keep an eye out on it. If you want to get in touch with me, you can always drop me a line on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

In 1 playlist(s)

  1. TechStuff

    2,435 clip(s)

TechStuff

TechStuff is getting a system update. Everything you love about TechStuff now twice the bandwidth wi 
Social links
Follow podcast
Recent clips
Browse 2,432 clip(s)