Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, jonvan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and How the tech Are. Yeah, welcome to my penultimate episode of hosting tech Stuff. I mean, you know, second to last normal tech Stuff. Anyway, I might occasionally host a special episode that drops into the feed now and then I'll still be around at iHeart Podcasts. I'll just be executive producer rising for the most part. But anyway, we're going to continue what we started in our last episode and talk about some of the biggest tech stories that have unfolded since tech Stuff first launched in mid two thousand and eight. And in our last episode, I went through the second half of two thousand and eight up through twenty fourteen. Today we're gonna go twenty fifteen up to present day. So that's more in years and I wrote more. So this is going to be one of those long episodes. But hey, I'm hanging up my boots, so you won't be having to put up with me for too much longer. So let's just go on this journey together, shall we. So we're up to twenty fifteen. That's when Apple first introduced the Apple Watch, and it would take a bit of time, no pun intended to get momentum on this product compared to other Apple products. But these days it is the most popular brand of smartwatch here in the United States and it holds like a thirty percent of the market share globally. Wearables and smart watches had been around for a while. It's not like Apple invented them. And though Apple created a popular smart watch, I would say that it didn't have the same sort of Cinderella energy as the original iPod, or the iPhone or even the iPad, at least not initially. So just as a reminder, Apple didn't invent the smartphone, it didn't invent the MP three player, it didn't invent the tablet computer. But it did succeed where everyone else had not in that it was able to create products that appealed to a wide audience and not just like a narrow tech geek niche. So there was every reason to expect that they would do the same with smart watches. It would just take a little bit longer for those to really become popular, And I honestly don't know how popular they are in comparison to Apple's other product lines. But another innovation that was introduced in twenty fifteen was Tesla's autopilot feature. That's the not really self driving mode that has made headlines many times, often for tragic or unfortunate reasons. This year, Miles Klee of Rolling Stone Magazine wrote a piece titled, Tesla has highest rate of deadly accidents among car brands, study fines. That's not great news. Meanwhile, President elect Trump's transition team has recently recommended that the new regime in the US repeal a rule that otherwise requires car companies that have self driving technologies incorporated into their vehicles to report on car crashes. So yeah, now the team is saying, hey, we should get rid of that rule. And you know, Elon Musk also happens to be heading up one of the government departments in the new administration. So I suspect this is just the beginning of a lot of these kinds of arguments that are are designed to remove restrictions and regulations and accountability to allow businesses to operate with little to know oversight. In other news, Google did a big old corporate restructuring by creating a company called Alphabet, which acts as a holding company for Google and its various spinoffs like YouTube and Android. In space news, Jeff Bezos's private space company, Blue Origin successfully launched and landed a reusable rocket called New Shepherd. SpaceX at that point had not yet managed to do the same thing. They had launched some spacecraft, but the landing had not really, they hadn't stuck the landing. I guess it's safe to say like sometimes their landings could be a little exclusive. But obviously SpaceX would catch up to Blue Origin and then like leave Blue Origin in the dust as far as private space industry stuff is concerned. I mean, you're going to see way more stories about SpaceX than Blue Origin typically. But the big story that I want to highlight from twenty fifteen came to be known as diesel Gate, and it involved the car company Volkswagen. So in September of twenty fifteen, the United States Environmental Protection Agency or EPA, accused Volkswagen of violating the US Clean Air Act through trickery. Essentially, the issue was that Volkswagen was using software, you know, software technology in order to fool emissions testing equipment regarding its diesel engine vehicles and the emissions that they put out. So here's kind of how it worked from a very high level. When a Volkswagen diesel vehicle detected that it was being put into testing mode, it would artificially limit the output of the engine so as not to exceed emissions standards. Now it would look like the engine was operating at normal capacity, but in fact it was purposefully holding itself back. Once it detected it was out of testing mode, the engine would switch back into normal operations, at which point the vehicle would be emitting more than restrictions would legally allow. So the investigation had actually been going on for a couple of years at this point. It started with some researchers at West Virginia's University and they were finding some pretty odd readings with a couple of Volkswagen diesel vehicles. Now they were using testing equipment that allowed for on road tests. That meant the vehicle was actually in use on roads at the time it was traveling. Most emissions tests are done with a vehicle that's stationary, it's not actually on the road, So the researchers were seeing unusually high emissions ratings on the two Volkswagen vehicles, and that merited further investigation because you know, when they were routinely tested in normal emissions testing facilities, they were under the limit, So something was going on here. Their findings found their way to regulators at both the California state level and the US federal level, and ultimately led to the EPA accusing Volkswagen of deception. Other countries subsequently investigated the matter and found similar results, and Volkswagen's stock prices plummeted. The CEO resigned, and the company apologized for, you know, essentially defrauding everybody. The gambit turned out to be a costly one for Volkswagen. Estimates put the total cost at nearly thirty five billion with a B dollars. That's a hefty amount of fines and legal expenses and replacement costs and that kind of thing. But beyond that, there were some considerable non financial costs. In fact, they were incalculable. For example, you can't really to fy the amount of damage that was just done to the environment or people's health, right like. That certainly was a factor, but we don't really have a way of putting a number on it. All in all, Diesel gait was an example of corporate subterfuge and greed. And here's a fun thing to think about. It's possible that organizations like the EPA here in the United States are going to face some pretty drastic cuts in funding or possibly even dissolution, setting the stage for companies to pull similar stunts without having to worry so much about being called to answer for transgressions, you know, the way that Volkswagen did back in twenty fifteen. If there are no regulatory agencies out there to oversee it, then it's almost like you're not doing it at all. Moving swiftly onwards to twenty sixteen, Okay, twenty sixteen was a huge year for tech news. In most of these years, when I was looking back, I'd be like, oh, there's like two or three stories that are contenders. But twenty sixteen just it was like the year that just kept on giving. It was an election year, and that was part of it here in the United States. But in twenty sixteen, we got an early smart watch that had been boosted through crowdfunding and boasted an e ink display that maximized battery life. It kicked the bucket. In twenty sixteen. This was the Pebble smart Watch, which was an ambitious project, independent project. Ultimately it was not able to succeed as a business. That was a bummer for me personally. I had actually backed it after the kickstarting campaign was already over it had already successfully completed the Kickstart campaign. In fact, it was one of the most successful campaigns at that time, and I had held back on backing it. But then I went to Cees and I saw a presentation about the Pebble smart Watch, and that convinced me to put in a pre order, and even though I got in too late, I ended up getting a Kickstarter edition watch. It's one of the red ones. I'm guessing that the people who were backing it didn't order as many of the red ones, although I thought the red one was really striking, which is why I got it, so I guess that's why I got a Kickstarter version. Anyway, I thought it was nifty, but Pebble ultimately didn't have staying power and it folded in twenty sixteen. Other notable tech stories from twenty sixteen included the tragic reveal that a Tesla vehicle operating in autopilot mode was involved in a fatal car accident that would sadly not be the last time we would hear something like that happening. The Hyperloop One company was plagued by a crazy power struggle and various legal battles, which meant we were not getting any closer to the science fiction vision that Elon Musk had laid out a couple of years earlier. If you don't remember what hyperloop is, the concept is it's a transportation system meant to go between like cities there may be a couple hundred or few hundred miles away from each other, and it can cysts in its original form as a tunnel that has had most or all of the air pumped out of it, so you have very very very low air pressure inside the tunnel. You've got a magnet system or air bearings, one of the two, or maybe both. It allows a train to essentially hover above the floor of the tunnel and travel with very little friction, so very little resistance, and it allows the train to reach incredible top speeds and thus make the trip in pretty short order while being more efficient and less costly than air travel, less environmentally pollutive, I guess than air travel as well, but Unfortunately, hyper Loop one, because of this big battle, ended up kind of getting again not to use a pun, but derailed. Hyper Loop one would stick around, but would severely cut back on its vision as far as what it's setting out to do. Another big story that happened in twenty sixteen is the explosive and that is intended controversy around the Samsung Galaxy seven Note smartphones. So there were multiple reports that detailed how these smartphones would spontaneously burst into fire and explode. It led to lots of restrictions on the phones. There were airlines that said, you cannot board a plane if you're carrying one of these. You have to leave it here. You can't take it on board because these things had proven to be unstable. And it turned out that the battery manufacturing process, which was actually being carried out with two different companies and had two separate issues, but they resulted in the same problem in that they created short circuits inside the battery that would lead to thermal runaway, meaning the battery would heat up and heat up and heat up until it ultimately failed and would explode. This was huge news, obviously, and it cost Samsung millions of dollars in recalls and lawsuits. It was a big story in twenty sixteen. There's so much more. Though, Yahoo admitted that it had been the victim of a massive data breach that year. That breach affected hundreds of millions of people. We would find out later it essentially affected anyone who had a Yahoo account at that time, Like, even if you hadn't used it in a while, you were affected. Also another cyber warfare kind of story, hackers brought down a domain name server host in the fall of that year, which in turn affected numerous major websites and services like Netflix and Amazon, so they were unavailable on again and off again in October twenty first, twenty sixteen. Like, that was just a bad day if you were one of those companies. That's just the tip of the iceberg. A ton of stuff happened in twenty sixteen and tech, but none of that is what I wanted to focus on in this episode. Instead, for me, the story that caught my attention most in twenty sixteen was kind of the official beginning of the end for the biotech company, Thearrahnose. It was literally the end of Therahnose that year. But then the beginning of the end for the freedom of the people who are leading Therahnose. So this was a company that was founded by Elizabeth Holmes, and it was a company that aimed to democratize medical testing. The idea being that you would end up with a device the size of a desktop printer that would allow the average person the chance to screen themselves for more than one hundred different diseases, all while just parting with the tiniest micro drop of blood. Because Elizabeth Holmes said she was scared of needles, and that was one of the reasons she didn't, you know, she would kind of avoid medical checkups. But she thought, said, well, if you could do it where you could only need the smallest drop of blood and you could run, you know, potentially hundreds of different or more than one hundred different medical tests on that little drop of blood, on a device that could sit on top of your desk and find out you know, what you need to look out for and what you know, what your health was, and maybe if there were any lifestyle changes you needed to make in order to live a healthier life. It would open up options for people that otherwise never would exist. That was the dream. When we come back, I'll talk about the problem that dream had when it came to meeting up with a thing I like to call reality. But first, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. Okay, we're back. So I left off talking about twenty sixteen and Fairhos. So here's an issue. This company's story was kind of the stuff of Silicon Valley fairy tales, Like it was the sort of thing that investors really get excited about. So Holmes had been attending Stanford University before she dropped out to create her company. She courted various investors, including really famous, high profile ones like Oracle found under Larry Ellison was one of them. The media conglomerate owner Rupert Murdoch was another. And so she had raised hundreds of millions of dollars to make her dream of becoming an iconic tech leader come true. And I want to be clear about that. Like, the technology was something that she thought would be really cool. She seemed to be pretty passionate about it. But my interpretation, which I admit is fully biased and I could be entirely wrong, was more that she was interested in being an icon than really, you know, having a belief and knowledge about this technology. She wanted to be another Steve Jobs, you know, be on the cover of magazines and be talked about as like this visionary leader. The trouble was her idea proved to be much less attainable than she initially thought. In late twenty fifteen, Wall Street Journal's John Kerrieru whose name I always butcher anyway, he broke the story that Darrenos the company was actually built. On top of this, that the company's supposed demonstrations of its technology were in actuality frauds. They were relying heavily on existing blood analysis technologies from other companies, so actual machines made by other companies that did standard blood tests. They were using those, but then claiming that the results came from their own technology, and that they would take tiny blood samples larger than a micro drop but still you know, pretty small. Then they would dilute those samples and then run tests on them using these other companies, you know, machines. Then they would pass off whatever the results were as their own work, while desperately trying to get their technology to operate properly. The story didn't end there either. There got worse, Like it unfolded that there had been advisors who had told Holmes early on that her idea was unrealistic from a technological and biological perspective, that just because she wanted it to work doesn't mean it would work. So essentially it turned out to be kind of an Emperor has No Clothes situation, and the company would totally unravel throughout twenty sixteen. In the process, Holmes, who had developed a reputation for extravagance and peculiar habits, found her net worth plunge to zero. She went from being one of the wealthiest women on the planet to having no net worth at all. The SEC opened an investigation into the company. Holmes and her business partner and on again off again romantic partner, Ramesh Malwani, would ultimately stand trial for multiple criminal charges of fraud and related crimes. Holmes then would be found guilty and sentenced to eleven years in prison, although that did get reduced a couple of times. Currently, I believe she will be eligible for release in the summer of twenty thirty two. Balwani would get a similar sentence of nearly thirteen years for his part in the deception and the reason I wanted to highlight therahos in this episode is because I think it really shines a light on some real issues in tech in general. So Issue one, companies overhype the capabilities of their technologies just par for the course. Here. Some folks refer to this as marketing. I call it lying. Issue two. Their nose really strips bear the dangers of the fake it till you make it philosophy that you know, folks will assume that if they can imagine it, that it's actually possible, and they'll build a business idea or an actual business around this concept before finding out if it really is possible or not, and by then it's too late. So you sell yourself on this idea, and then you scramble to try and make the idea actually work in the real world. It is not a good approach. I mean, when it works, it's great. It just very rarely works. Issue three, and this is relating to the last one. It reminds us that while technology is incredible and it can let us do stuff that previous generations would have thought was impossible, technology is not without limitations. It's not some sort of magic get out of jail free card for all situations. Issue for the trappings of the tech icon identity are really tempting, you know, from wealth or influence to the public perception that you're someone who's just really innovative and savvy. There's a lot to envy there, so you can understand why someone would want to be in that category. Issue five. Investors can sometimes propel a bad idea into the world despite the fact it's a bad idea, and that wouldn't be an issue except that in the course of things, other people who are innocent can end up suffering as a result of this. So with the Theradouse case, that included patients who were relying on what ended up being unreliable medical results. So they are like actual people, sick people who were you know, making use of this supposed tech and there's a chance that some of the stuff they got back was not at all reliable, which that's life endangering. That's terrible. So I think Fraans is going to be a case study for many, many years. It's a lesson on what not to do and how not to do it, and I hope a lot of people take that to heart and they, you know, they learn from those mistakes. Let's move on to twenty seventeen. Holy cow, this is taking forever. It's almost as long as living through those years in real time. Anyway, twenty seventeen, mega venture capital fund company soft Bank invested hundreds of millions of dollars into a company that was portrayed as if it were a tech company, but it really wasn't. In reality, all it was doing was little more than subleasing office space to clients, and that company was we Work. Now, over the following years, soft Bank would increase this investment to the point where it's spent around sixteen billion with a B dollars on work, not just in investments, but you know, overall. We Work meanwhile, would prep itself for an initial public offering or IPO in twenty nineteen. Unfortunately, that public offering imploded before it could happen. It was kind of an absurd situation, like there were corporate documents that just read like new age, you know, ridiculous meaningless babble. Anyway, we Work did not go public, and it then started to go into a period of decline and actually went into bankruptcy protection in twenty twenty three. And it didn't go away, It didn't go out of business. It did go into bankruptcy, but it's still around. Some view we work as sort of a cautionary tale about the startup ecosystem, and as crazy as that story is, it's still not the one I picked to focus on this episode. Other things that happened in twenty seventeen. There were a lot more data breaches that year, including equa Fax, which is a credit reporting company that was huge like bad bad news. I mean, you expect an institution like a credit reporting company to have really strong security measures because that's incredibly sensitive information that affects millions of people, Like we're all lumped into that system here in the United States. You know, everyone's got their credit rating and everything, so having that information get breached very damaging. The Yahoo breach I mentioned earlier would end up becoming more clear in twenty seventeen. That's when we learned that essentially everybody was whoever had a Yahoo account was affected by it. And it also had a huge impact on an acquisition because Verizon was buying Yahoo, and it ended up affecting that acquisition deal by knocking off around three hundred and fifty million dollars off Yahoo's sales price. So yikes. Facebook's mark Zuckerberg was called to face questioning from Congress, and not for the last time, after Facebook had served up political ads that turned out to have been paid for by Russian groups, and these were political ads for the United States, so they were intended to sway Americans who were voting in the twenty sixteen presidential elections, and this started up a conversation in America about how to protect against foreign interference in American elections, something that hadn't really taken like the headlines by storm in previous years, but this time it really was. Fortunately, we have all of that sorted out today and there's no more problem. That was me being sarcastic. Cryptocurrency boomed in twenty seventeen and Ethereum became more of a known quantity and introduced the possibility of other blockchain based cryptocurrencies based off the Ethereum blockchain. At this point, Ethereum was a proof of work cryptocurrency, just like Bitcoin is, but would later turn to be a proof of stake, but that would take a few years. Arguably this was really when proof of work currencies began, making it very hard for non crypto customers to get hold of graphics processing units or GPUs, particularly in the video game space. GPUs are important. Crypto miners were relying on these cards because they have great parallel processing capabilities and that helps when you're mining cryptocurrency and a proof of work system. So yeah, this was the beginning of a tough time. If you were a gamer and you wanted to get hold of the latest in GPUs, it was just as hard to get hold of them for a few years. But the big story I really wanted to talk about is the no good, very bad year that Uber had in twenty seventeen. Now, to be clear, a lot of the stuff that happened to Uber in twenty seventeen had actually been happening for a while. It's just that it all came to a head in twenty seventeen. So starting off, we've got some political events that landed Uber in a critical place. They got a lot of criticism for this. So in January twenty seventeen, Donald Trump passed some executive actions that placed hefty restrictions on foreign nation being allowed into the United States, and largely these restrictions affected people who were traveling from countries that have a large Muslim population. So people got very upset They were enraged that Trump was apparently engaging in profiling because it's not like these other countries that don't have large Muslim populations were affected. So yeah, it was it was hard to justify. But in response to his move, taxi cab drivers in New York City refused to work in protest of these travel restrictions, and they did this the day following when Trump signed those executive actions, and Uber became news because it lifted surge pricing in New York in an apparent attempt to take advantage of a lack of competition due to that taxi driver work stoppage, and it was seen as a move to undermine a political protest, and in response, a hashtag called delete Uber began to circulate. As it would turn out, there would be lots of other reasons folks would want to delete Uber as the year went on that didn't involve travel restrictions at all. So next up. In February twenty seventeen, a former Uber engineer named Susan Fowler came forward posting a blog post that made public accusations regarding gender discrimination and sexual harassment within Uber, and she detailed a devastatingly toxic work culture that was particularly harmful toward women within the company. Fowler's move would inspire other women within the tech industry to come forward with their own stories, and when paired with the blossoming Me Too movement in late twenty seventeen, this would build into a more unified call for change and accountability. And I wish I could say that we got there, that things were all better now, But over the following years we would get more stories about companies and toxic work cultures and sexual harassment that had been codified into company culture. So we got a long way to go. But also in February twenty seventeen, a video went viral showing then Uber CEO Travis Kalanik, who co founded the company, getting into an argument with an Uber driver, and the driver protested to Kalanick that the company was putting drivers in a squeeze because it was raising standards for stuff like, you know, the types of cars that could be used on various Uber services, while also dropping prices for customers, and drivers were having to pay more and they were getting paid less. Kalan Nick got really argumentative, but the whole exchange was captured on a dash cam. The driver later uploaded it to YouTube. I found quite a bit of popularity. Kalanik later issued an apology in an internal email in Uber. He sensed that perhaps he didn't come off looking really sympathetic because he was sitting in the back of an Uber black vehicle between two women sitting next to him and arguing with his driver about the fact that the driver needed to take responsibility for his own financial situation. That Uber was blameless in this particular batter, You know, considering how Uber was also trying to dodge the responsibility for accusations brought against the company from Vowler. The fact that he was arguing that, hey, you need to take responsibility for your life while simultaneously the company was trying to dodge responsibility struck a lot of people as being perhaps on the touch ironic side, and we're not done with their year. That's just the beginning of the year. In March, the New York Times published an article revealing that Uber was making use of a tool called gray Ball. Now. The purpose of this tool was to fool local authorities in regions where Uber's operations were unsanctioned. In other words, gray Ball was meant to trick police so that Uber drivers could operate in places where they weren't technically allowed. The gray Ball tool would identify law enforcement that was attempting to hail a ride. So let's say that police are trying to prove that Uber is operating in a place where they're not supposed to, so they're using their phone to call a ride. Well, grey Ball was meant to identify when it was a police officer, and then the police officer would see cars on the app, but no car would ever come to actually pick them up, so you know, there was no way for them to use that as evidence that Uber was picking up or dropping off in that particular region. So Uber spokespeople claimed that the tool was actually meant to protect drivers. It was meant to prevent them from picking up a fair from somebody who was abusing Uber's systems in other words, and said that you know, the drivers are independent contractors and that they should also not be persecuted or They also suggested that law enforcement was somehow in collusion with taxi companies to muscle ride hailing services out of various regions. I think it is good to point out that even if that were true, it doesn't mean that Uber gets a free pass to break the law, Like the law is the law, and a law can be unjust, but breaking an unjust law still comes with consequences. And I know it's an easy pat answer to say that the solution is to change the law, because you know, I know our system here in the United States. I know, at best it's byzantine and complicated, and at worst it's broken and biased. But you know, it's still a law. That's the problem. Like you can't just choose which laws to obey and which ones not to obey. Now, that still just gets us into to March of twenty seventeen, and Uber's very bad, no good year still has a long way to go. In May, the company had to come clean about how it was paying drivers. So, in an example that g Nome Shiber used in the New York Times, if a fare cost twenty dollars and taxes on that fare were two dollars, Uber was only supposed to take its commission, which is twenty five percent off the eighteen dollars that were left over so after taxes. However, it was discovered that Uber appeared to instead be taking its twenty five percent share before taxes, so in the example that Schiber gave, it would take twenty five percent of twenty bucks, which is five dollars, instead of twenty five percent of eighteen bucks, which is four dollars fifty cents, and it meant that drivers were taking home less money than what they were actually owed. An advocacy group argued that what Uber was actually doing was passing the cost of state taxes onto drivers, particularly in the state of New York, and Uber was not assuming the responsibility of paying taxes as a company, and this was a tough argument against Uber, and Uber executives said that the company was dedicated to paying all drivers the money that they were owed due to this practice, that they were sorry for it, and you know, et cetera, et cetera. So this ended up costing the company as well, gave it another black eye, which was unfortunate because at this point Uber had more black eyes than eyes. At the halfway mark of the year in June, and internal investigation in Uber led to twenty people in the company, some of them in leadership positions, being fired for inappropriate behavior. And by inappropriate behavior, I'm mostly referring to sexual harassment. In addition, the board of directors pressured Travis Kalanick to resign, which he did, though he still had many close friends on the board of directors, so that was a bit of a struggle too, and we're not done so. In Singapore, it was discovered that Uber had been renting dangerous vehicles to drivers. These were vehicles that had known safety issues, namely, once in a while they would catch on fire, and Uber apparently knew this and still use those vehicles to rent to drivers in Singapore to drive for the company, which seems in my mind a tiny bit negligent. Uber also lost its license to operate within the City of London for failure to adhere to certain corporate responsibility requirements, and near the end of the year, the company had to come clean about a data breach that had happened in twenty sixteen and allowed hackers to access information about drivers and customers alike. Oh and also that Uber had paid a ransom to keep the whole thing quiet. And as I always point out, paying ransoms is bad because it reinforces to the attackers that ransoms work, and it just means we get more of them. So it's better not to do that anyway. Yeah, not a good year for Uber, especially since you know, they paid to keep that thing quiet and it came out in the open anyway. So twenty seventeen rough year. All Right, we got a whole lot to get through. So let's take another quick break and when we come back, we'll pick up with twenty eighteen. We're back. So in twenty eighteen here in the United States, we were coming to grips with how to navigate city streets while all these folks on rental electric scooters were whizzing around on sidewalks and roads, and it was a mess. It was a mess because you know, you had all these people just getting in the way of pedestrians, traffic and stuff. It was a mess because you would have folks abandoning their electric scooter wherever they wanted, including like in the middle of the road sometimes or some people would get upset about the electric scooters and would round up as many as they could and like throw them in a pond or whatever. It was just a a huge mess and an example of a tech oriented business model that hit the streets before local laws and regulations could really weigh in on how this should interact with the existing infrastructure. So example here in Atlanta. Technically, the law is that if you're driving one of these things, you're supposed to be on the road. You're not supposed to be on a sidewalk. And technically I believe you're supposed to be wearing a helmet, though nobody does, and as far as I've seen, no one really enforces that either, But that's what the rule is supposed to be anyway. Twenty eighteen was also the year when five G wireless technologies first began to take headlines by storm. And it turns out five G is a little more complicated than just being one G better than four G. There are different flavors, if you will, of five G. So on one end, you've got like the ultra high frequency five G bands. These are the ones that are great for super high throughput, so you're able to make huge data transfers in very short amounts of time. But it has a limited transmission range, and also the frequencies aren't really good at penetrating solid matter, so if you happen to be, say on the other side of a wall as a transmitter, you might not actually be able to make use of that five G transmitter. Lower frequency five G bands allow for longer distance communications, and they penetrate through stuff like walls, but they also have lower data throughput values, so you don't have the quote unquote speed of the other version of five G. But communicating all of this to customers is hard, Like how do you say, Hey, under certain circumstances, you're going to get this kind of experience, but under every other circumstance it's going to be like this, that's muddy. So a lot of the marketing that I saw really focused on the ideal hypothetical situation you could find yourself in where you have this incredible throughput with these ultrai frequency five G transmitters and ignored everything else, and that just set people up for disappointment unless they just happened to be in an area where they could take advantage of those ultra high frequency transmitter stations, in which case they had a great experience as long as a wall didn't come between them and the tower. Rumors first began to circulate in this year that Apple had been working on a mixed reality headset, with the original goal of having it come to market by twenty twenty. Of course, we would realize later that the Apple Vision pro would not debut until early twenty twenty four, and the somewhat tep in response to that headset has put the future of the product line into question. I have read a lot of analysts that have said that Apple is likely going to release a lower cost, stripped down version of the Vision pro that they haven't fully abandoned the tech product line. But you know, we'll just have to see what happens, and by the time you hear this, maybe we'll already have seen it. That's also twenty eighteen was the year when Elon Musk would get into trouble with SEC, not for the last time. He tweeted out that he intended to take Tesla private for four hundred and twenty dollars a share and that some presumably some unnamed investors would front him the funds to do it. But turns out that was what we call a lie, and the SEC wasn't so big on the whole. Hey, it was just a weed joke. Defense Musk, as CEO of Tesla, has a responsibility to Tesla's shareholders, and the SEC said, hey, you can't go around defrauding everyone, even if it's a joke, because you're the CEO. You can't say that you're going to take the company private if you don't actually have plans to do that. Musk would go on to build a very contentious relationship with the SEC, and I'm very curious to see how that plays out over the next few years. Okay, here's the story I actually wanted to focus on for twenty eighteen. That was the year when Facebook, specifically Mark Zuckerberg, was called before Congress again, this time to talk about the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which had been broiling around the tech world for a couple of years but really only became public knowledge and a big story in twenty eighteen. So in case you don't remember what this was all about, Cambridge Analytica was a political consulting firm that worked on various political campaigns, including Trump's first candidacy for president back in twenty sixteen here in the United States. And it turned out that Cambridge Analytica worked with a researcher, a data scientist, who had designed an app essentially a personality test slash survey, and this app would scrape data off of Facebook without the knowledge or consent of most of the people who were affected by it. So here's how it kind of worked. So essentially, some users were invited to take this little personality test slash survey, and in return they would receive a small amount of money, so they were being paid to do it. The survey involved installing this app extension in Facebook that let the developer look at all the profiles connected to the users who were taking the test as if the developer were was that that user. So let me use an example to explain this. Let's say that I'm on Facebook and I'm friends with you, and I've decided to take this survey, and let's say that you had set your Facebook profiles so that only your friends could see it, like the public cannot see what you post, only your friends can see that. Well, because of the loophole that existed in Facebook's app environment at the time when this data scientist was doing this research, the data scientists could view your profile as if the data scientist were me, like it would be like if it were in my place, and they would just see everything you had posted because I'm your friend, and now the data scientist is posing against me and can see everything that you've posted. And thus they were able to get hold of tons of information that involved people who had never consented to having their information collected or used. Now, Cambridge Analytica was aiming to take that information and create various targeted campaigns in various regions, including doing stuff like discouraging people from voting. You know, if it turned out that there was a region that was not likely to support one of the candidates that had hired Cambridge Analytica, they would try to discourage people from voting at all to help boost their clients' numbers. So, in the Trump example, if it turns out like there's a county in a state that's not likely to support Trump, but maybe Trump could carry the state. If that county just didn't participate in the election, they would target that county that kind of thing. Now, their effectiveness in actually accomplishing this goal was a matter of debate. I saw a lot of people kind of dismissed, saying like, yeah, you know, what they did was unethical and potentially illegal, but they also were not really good at it. But still, the data collection thing was huge, Like it violated the privacy of millions of people. So Facebook also faced a ton of criticism because it facilitated this. It allowed it to happen through having this lax policy, which, to be fair to Facebook, the company had already addressed. They had already closed that loophole before anyone had come to the public with Cambridge Analytica. Like, I don't even think anyone at Facebook necessarily knew about Cambridge Analytica at that point. They just had been made aware of this loophole and they had fixed it. Also unrelated to that, but the company's chief operating officer at the time, Cheryl Sandberg, landed in the hot seat because apparently she had hired a PR firm to investigate people who are criticizing Facebook, which seems like an intimidation tactic to me, right, Like, sure would be a shame if you said something bad about Facebook and then I don't know, people found out you were having an affair on your spouse or something like that. As very skullduggery and cloak and daggery not attract. Okay, we are now up to twenty nineteen. We still have several years to go, but don't worry. Like once I hit twenty twenty, things go real fast. However, because of the length of this episode, we do need to take another quick break to thank our sponsors. We'll be back to wrap all this up. Stick with me because I'm not going to be doing this much longer. All right, we're back, and we're up to twenty nineteen. So Tesla introduced the cyber truck that year. It was a sometimes a fairly embarrassing unveiling. It included a moment when windows that were supposed to be reinforced and difficult to shatter shattered. That was a whoopsie. But it would actually take several more years before any cyber trucks would be ready to ship to customers, so you could argue this was one of those events that happened way too early. I also think that's going to be the case for some other Tesla products, like their robots. Like a fully fledged robot capable of doing what their robots appeared to do at a recent Tesla event, I imagine is going to take a few more years. And also, I'm sure no one anticipated someone blowing up a cyber truck outside of Trump's Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. So as I record this episode, we still don't have all the details about the Las Vegas incident. We know that there was a fatality, the person who was in the car and seven injuries, and it appears to have been an attack. I mean, the news articles I've read have suggested that the car was laiden down with potentially a mixture of fireworks and fuel, maybe other explosive devices, and so it appears that it was purposefully exploded outside of Trump's casino in Nevada. But we don't know anything more than that at the time that I'm recording this. So if more details have come out by the time you hear this, what a tragic and baffling sort of thing. Like I never get these acts of public violence. It's absolutely alien to me. Twenty nineteen is also the year that Disney Plus launched, which I don't think merrit's a whole lot of conversation, except to say I think of it as almost like a tipping point where the number of streaming services started to get out of control. I mean, we already had Hulu and Netflix and Amazon Prime Video and HBO Max and Disney Plus joining the ranks would make things more crowded, and we were just getting started. I mean, Apple TV Plus also debuted in twenty nineteen that was more of a prestige television angle. That Apple was going for but still adding even more options there. And today we live in a world where there's so many different streaming services that we're starting to see them make bundles because they recognize that they're too many and that if they all try and stand on their own, they're not going to get a big slice of the pie because customers have a limit to how much they're willing to subscribe to, or at least most do. We're getting bundles and consolidation because of that, because there's just so many of these gosh darn streaming services out there, and most of them aren't even nearly as good as dropout TV. And I don't know anyone on dropout TV. I just know that dropout TV is really good, all right, Speaking of a flood of media. It's funny because in twenty nineteen we saw what we thought was a big booming period in podcasting. And I say it's funny because the next year would put twenty nineteen to shame. But yeah, twenty nineteen was an important year, Like we saw a lot of people getting into podcasting, including high profile personalities like cod and O'Brien starting his podcast that year. Meanwhile, there were folks like yours truly, who had been going strong for more than a decade to that point. And all I'm saying is I was podcasting before it was cool now. I think the story of twenty nineteen that I want to focus on is that the various US regulatory agencies and the Department of Justice here in the United States began to consider anti trust investigations into big tech companies, primarily members of the Big Five. And those are Facebook, which is now Meta Alphabet, which is you know, Google's parent company, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft. And those stories are still playing out today, with Google in particular looking ahead to a ruling from a judge that could determine the future of Google Chrome, among other things. Twenty nineteen was also the year that TikTok exploded in popularity, so it already launched, but before twenty nineteen, it was largely just this obscure app that teens were using to lip sync to various music tracks and create, you know, fun little videos that way. But in twenty nineteen it became a fully fledged short form video social network, and it also quickly became a concern among people who were worried about stuff like privacy and security, and obviously that escalated in later years and ultimately would lead to the United States government banning the app in twenty twenty before unless it separates from its Chinese parent company, Byte Dance. However, I should add that the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to delay the deadline for this. It was set for January nineteenth, which is the day before Trump takes office. He's now asking the Supreme Court to delay that deadline, and presumably Trump would then attempt to change the thing like it's already been signed into law. So I don't actually know what the process is at this point. I mean, he's the president of the United States, but like, I don't think he just has the power to undo something for a previous president had signed into law. But I'm no constitutional expert, so what do I know? All Right, So, now we're up to twenty twenty, and nothing happened that year, At least I'd like to pretend nothing happened in twenty twenty. The COVID nineteen pandemic obviously made an enormous impact on everything in the world, including the tech sector. It pushed some companies to the spotlight, so tools like Zoom and Slack became crucial to businesses that needed their teams to be able to work together even when they weren't allowed to like go to the office. And as I mentioned a moment ago, podcasts had another explosive moment of growth in twenty twenty. Everyone and their Dog launched a show that year. Most of those shows ended within three episodes, but some of them stuck around. Some tech companies or companies connected to tech, found themselves in deep trouble in twenty twenty. You know, like we work, we work not technically being a tech company, but treated that way. It was already having issues before the pandemic, but the pandemic meant that customers had no need for office space in the meantime, and we work with sitting on all these leases that it needed to you know, pay off, So that put we work in a really tough position, set it up for the path to bankruptcy in twenty twenty three. Now, one huge story connected to the pandemic was how the Internet facilitated the spread of misinformation that year, twenty twenty election year in the United States. We always see an uptick in misinformation on those years, and boy howdy, did we see it in twenty twenty, Like, remember stories like how five G wireless technologies were supposedly carrying the coronavirus in some inexplicable way, Like there were actual people who believe that. I don't understand how that's the case. I guess if you aren't aware of how wireless technologies work and the way or lack of way that they interact with organisms, I suppose you could be convinced. But like it just takes the smallest amount of education to learn that just isn't a viable possibility. I still can't wrap my head around that one. It's been four years, y'all. And that's just one example of one of the weird fringe theories that went around related to tech and the coronavirus. There's so many. And because it was an election year, and while twenty sixteen gave us a taste of how misinformation and propaganda campaigns could work, largely funded from foreign sources and primarily from Russia, honestly, twenty sixteen felt like an informal rehearsal compared to what happened in twenty twenty plus. We were starting to see how emerging technologies like deep fakes could potentially play a part in misinformation campaigns down the road. It was in twenty twenty when Trump as president first attempted to ban TikTok through an executive order. Interestingly, now that TikTok is actually facing a legal ban here in the United States, not just an executive order but a law that's been passed, Trump now opposes this move, perhaps because one of his big financial supporters during the twenty twenty four campaign also happened to be a big investor in byte Dance, which is TikTok's parent company. But who's to say, okay. There's also a move to take the protections out of section two thirty of the nineteen ninety six Communications Decency Act in twenty twenty. That's the measure that protects platforms online platforms from being held legally liable for content that was posted by users. So if a user posts something that's illegal, the platform is not held responsible for that, particularly if the platform responds appropriately by removing the content and restricting the person from being able to do that again. I suspect that we're going to see a much harder push to strip Section two thirty protections moving forward. In twenty twenty five. I would be amazed if section two thirty remains a thing by the end of Trump's presidency. We'll see, all right. So twenty twenty is also the year that Quibi debuted. Do you remember Quibi? Quibi debuted, it sputtered, and it died, all in the span of a year. If you don't remember Quibi. It was a short form video platform that poured a whole lot of money into very highly produced, professional video projects. So this wasn't user generated. This was meant to be like Netflix or Amazon Prime or whatever, except for short form video. It was made with an audience watching on mobile devices in mind. In fact, every production was made so that you could view it portrait or landscape, to the point where like directors had to frame their shots so that it would work in either orientation. But the project did not work out so well in a world where everybody was stuck at home because of the coronavirus and they would just watch stuff on larger screens instead of their phones. Most analysts that I've read up on seemed to agree that even if the pandemic hadn't been a thing, Quibi's success was a long shot at best. And that you couldn't say that the coronavirus made Quibi fail, but sure to help. I think the story to reflect on in twenty twenty is the solar Winds hack, which opened their eyes to the dangers of supply chain attacks. Now that's a complicated story, but i'll sum it up. A company called solar Winds creates software for enterprise clients, so that is other businesses. Hackers were able to hide some malware into a solar Winds update to software called Orion. So rather than focus on the end targets such as you know, specific agencies in the US government, the hackers implant the malware in a trusted partner's software package, which then got pushed out to the customers all around the world and infected those customers. So this was a huge and very effective cyber attack. While thousands of organizations were impacted, it appeared as though the attackers had a few specific targets in mind. It's just their attack was super effective across all of solar Winds customers using the Orion platforms. So the reason I included in this episode isn't because of how devastating the attack was, although it was quite devastating, but rather it illustrates how effective a supply chain attack can be. So, if you have identified that your target has really strong defenses and you're not likely to be able to penetrate their systems, maybe you target one of their trusted partners so you can find a way in. It's scary stuff. In twenty twenty one, we had a few interesting things happen. Antivirus software developer and totally bunked's personality, John McAfee passed away. I know it's ghost to speak ill of the dead, but this guy really was wild. So in a normal world, McAfee would best be known as a guy who created McAfee antivirus. But we don't live in a normal world. We live in this one, and this is the world where McAfee was perhaps best known for living a kind of sex, drugs, and rock and roll lifestyle, which comes complete with him living in a different country and at one point being under suspicion for a committing murder on one of his neighbors, something that may or may not have involved him, we don't know. He was wanted in the United States for tax evasion, and he was arrested while in Barcelona Spain, and then he was found dead in his prison cell not long after. The Spanish courts that approved his extradition to the United States absolutely wild, and the implication is that he did take his own life while he was in jail rather than be extradited to the un to stand trial. Microsoft launched Windows eleven and twenty twenty one, and it has generally received a more positive reception. There are some notable exceptions that would unfold later on. Microsoft had skipped over the number nine. It went from Windows eight to Windows ten. Windows ten got a fair reception. Windows eleven seemed to be an improvement in many ways, but some recent developments have critics upset at Microsoft, namely the recall or recall feature, which takes snapshots of user activities on their computers, so like, you can search through these snapshots to find times when you've visited certain sites or use certain apps or whatever. Advocates have argued that this represents a privacy and security vulnerability, and Microsoft did tweak it quite a bit in response to those criticisms. But it's opt in, so at least you're not like using it by default. But I guess the big story that year was really a pair of news items that arguably had some connection to one another, and both of them involved Facebook. So in the first story, a whistleblower named Francis Hogan, who had previously worked as a data scientist for Facebook, came forward with the accusations and documentation showing that Facebook's policies did a lot of bad stuff, like putting children at risk, for example, and that Facebook executives further know about this, and the company had worked hard to hide it from the public while still pursuing these variously harmful or potentially harmful policies, and that really what was all about was the company was seeking profit over anything else, even in the wake of potentially hurting not just children, which is bad enough all by itself, but also hurting things like institutions like democracy. And Haugen's testimony to Congress was brutal. It is wild to me that we have largely forgotten the things she brought forward back in twenty twenty one, because it was extensive and I thought pretty damning, But you know, we've largely moved on since then. Now. Not long after her accusations became headlines, Facebook added to the chaos by announcing the company was changing its name to Meta Now. Ostensibly this was because Facebook would be investing heavily in the metaverse concept, which is a vague vision of the future of online interactivity that typically involves some form of mixed reality component. Critics argued that it was an attempt for the company to distance itself from the very real accusations flying from the testimony and documentation that had come out earlier in the year. However, here we are in twenty twenty four and Meta is still very much a thing. Investors sometimes get a little miffed at Mark Zuckerberg for continuing to pour so much money and R and D into mixed reality AI and the metaverse concepts, but other than that, the Meta ship continues to sail fairly smoothly all things considered. All Right, now, we're up to twenty twenty two. Man, let's power through it saw a lot of stuff happen in twenty twenty two. Non fungible tokens aka NFTs had become mainstream headlines in twenty twenty one. They'd been around a little longer than that, but twenty twenty one was when the mainstream public really became aware of them, and that's when we saw a speculative market form around these blockchain based digital markers, and I think a lot of the speculation was rooted deeply in ignorance as to what NFTs actually are, or maybe more accurately, what they are not. Anyway, it was early in twenty twenty two when that speculative market collapsed in on itself, and NFTs as a whole lost nearly all of their value in the process. So what had been the gold mine of twenty twenty one became kind of a punchline in twenty twenty two, and suddenly some people found themselves in possession of a digital marker that was worthless after they had spent perhaps thousands or tens of thousands of dollars on them. One big story that spanned nearly all of twenty twenty two was Elon Musk's quest to purchase Twitter. His intentions first became clear in the spring of twenty twenty two, but not long after he announced his plan to buy it, he began to backpedal, and he tried to get out of the deal, but doing so would have cost him an awful lot of money because he had already entered into the negotiations in good faith and backing out just wasn't an option, at least not without consequences. At one point, the United States court system got involved, and Musk capitulated and agreed to buy Twitter for a whopping forty four billion dollars before he was forced to do so, so he did it by choice technically. One of the investors in Twitter, a company called Fidelity, would later estimate in twenty twenty four that Twitter's value had gone all the way down to nine point four billion dollars. So he spent forty four billion and now it's worth nine point four billion. That is a heck of a decline in just two years. Russia's invasion of Ukraine would also have a huge impact on technology. For one thing, the US would start to restrict business dealings with Russian based companies that included tech companies like Kaspersky, which is a cybersecurity firm, and many a American based tech companies would pull out of operations within Russia. So you had companies just picking up stakes and moving out of Russia, sometimes even suspending customer access to platforms within Russia in the process. YouTube has been in hot water with the Russian government on and off again since this, because they have done things like block state backed misinformation channels because it's misinformation and Russia's government doesn't like that very much. Also, as the tech sector began to settle after the chaos that had followed the COVID outbreak, we started seeing the first of many rounds of layoffs. Companies that had grown very quickly to respond to changing conditions during the pandemic found themselves ready to slim down again once things were starting to settle, and we still see that happening today. There have been numerous cuts in the sector and it's really demoralizing and hard to see those headlines month after month. Also in twenty twenty two, we got open AI's chat GPT. Arguably that should be my big story, because generative AI would continue to be an enormous topic in the following years. But I think the big story I want to focus on from twenty twenty two is the implosion of FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange. So as a reminder, the face of this company, the co founder Sam Bankman Freed or SBF, would be accused of running a kind of fraud in which he was taking customer deposits in FTX and then using those to cover investments that were being made by a sister company called Alameda Research. So Alameda was kind of a hedge fund company that would invest in businesses related to the crypto space, but to cover investments that were made there. SBF and team were siphoning money away from FTX in the hopes that no one would really notice and that maybe in the long run they would be able to cover all their bases. But an expose in late twenty twenty two led to investigations, which in turn led to SBF getting the boot from the company and ultimately to his arrest. He has since been sentenced to twenty five years in prison and ordered to pay eleven billion with a B dollars in forfeiture, which is something I suspect will not ever be paid off, but heck, who knows, maybe he'll get a pardon. This administration lot to see now. The collapse of FDx added to the instability in general in the crypto market. It led to other crypto exchanges and other companies falling apart as a result, including a couple of banks that had been instrumental in the crypto world, and for a short while, it looked like crypto in general, could end up sinking as a result of the FTX failure, but ultimately the industry did weather the storm and would prove to be as volatile as ever in the long run. But yeah, the failure of FTX was a reminder that sometimes tech isn't there to enable new things, but maybe just mask attempts to commit fraud, you know, just make it confusing enough and nobody asks any questions. Okay. Twenty twenty three this was the year that Musk changed the name of Twitter to X while making sweeping changes that alienated many users and encouraged a bunch of others. The users who were alienated often left and ultimately would go to some other alternative short form messaging or social network services. The whole pay for a verified check mark strategy must introduce chased off a ton of people who had previously received a check mark from being a notable personality of some sort. I was one of those people. I had a checkmark and I was on Twitter. I would argue I am not actually notable, but I did have a check mark. But you know, twenty twenty three was really a year that was all about AI. So Chad GBT had debuted in twenty twenty two, but it was twenty twenty three that saw artificial intelligence make headlines pretty much every single day of the year. Sometimes it was because of the incredible display of AI's capabilities, some of which really are you know, amazing. There were also tons of think pieces about the technology's shortcomings, everything from hallucinations or confabulations to the possible impact on creative like you know, whether or not AI is plagiarizing the work of actual human beings or putting them out of work because folks will use AI to I don't know, generate marketing slogans as opposed to hiring marketers or create artwork instead of hiring an artist, that kind of stuff. We got lots of warnings from critics who were worried about deploying a technology before it was thoroughly tested to make sure it was safe. You know, we just could not get away from AI in twenty twenty three. Whether it was Open AI or Google or Meta or Microsoft or Amazon or some other company. Artificial intelligence dominated headlines throughout twenty twenty three, and we asked a lot of questions and we only got a few answers, and none of them were relevant or good. So we're still working on that related to this. In twenty twenty three, Sam Altman, who was one of the co founders and the CEO of open Ai, got the boot from the Board of directors. He was fired, but then he was a to return to the company after enormous pressure was put on the Board of directors to reverse their decision. The board was concerned that Altman was leading open Ai in a direction that was in opposition to its founding principles, which were to develop AI in a safe and accountable and transparent way. So the board directors were saying, that's not what's happening, and we need to get rid of this guy because he's pushing the company to do something that's fundamentally in opposition to what it's supposed to be about. But the board's decision was reversed. The board was then kind of given the boot and replaced, and Sam Altman to this day remains the CEO of open Ai, And considering the stories involving open Ai since then, I think the Board of Directors' concerns were merited. I'll say that. And then finally, after all this time, we get to twenty twenty four, and a lot happened in twenty twenty four, but let's be honest, there's only one story that we really need to talk about. The big story in tech is that Jonathan Strickland, co founder and host of the popular podcast tech Stuff, announced he would be stepping down from the show in early twenty twenty five. In fact, next episode will be my last as host of the show officially, though again who knows. I may occasionally pop in with a special episode here or there, depending upon circumstances, but I should add I don't have any plans to do that just yet. I'm just saying it's a possibility. I'm not leaving it off the table. It could happen. We just don't have plans for it. But yeah, the curtain is closing in on me and I've got one episode left before I shuffle off backstage. And in our next episode, you will meet the new hosts of Tech Stuff, the people who will bring the show to new heights that I can only dream about. I'm genuinely excited to see where they take it and how they share their own view of technology. And yeah, the show will be different, but I have no doubts it will be even better than before, and now so I can say it one last time to y'all, 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.