Closing out the Tech Stories of 2020 - August through December

we were out, I pull us back in. But we're going to wrap up the big stories that involved tech in tw with this batch, I promise, And tomorrow you're gonna get a new episode of Tech Stuff. We're now going to go to five episodes a week now. I'll talk more about that at the end of this episode, but just know that this doesn't mean every episode will be kind of a deep dive like this one. We're going to put some variety in there, so I'll talk

more about that later. Now. One bit of great news we got in August was that returning astronauts safely splashed down in a SpaceX Dragon capsule, which was the first time NASA had used the commercial space company spacecraft to bring astronauts to and from the International Space Station, which was pretty fantastic. In early August, we saw a once influential tech brand fade away. The brand was the US

cell phone carrier Sprint. T Mobile, once a competitor of Sprint, had concluded a thirty billion dollar merger just a few months earlier. In August, T Mobile retired the Sprint brand. They folded it entirely into T Mobile's business. Before that, Sprint had been the fourth of the four large cell phone carriers in the United States, and it had been struggling up to the point of that acquisition, and several analysts actually suggested that if T Mobile had not swooped in,

Sprint might well have been heading towards bankruptcy. If you listen to the previous two episodes in this series, you heard how President Trump was having an increasingly combative relationship with social networks, which had been up to that point pretty reliable ways for him to get his message out to followers for most of his presidency. Twitter had already started labeling some of the President's tweets with flags that

indicated that they could contain volatile or incorrect information. Facebook finally followed suit, removing a Trump post that pushed to claim that children are nearly immune to COVID nineteen, and Zuckerberg had expressed some private concerns about Trump, and he was under intense pressure from media, from advertisers, from users, and from Facebook employees to have the company take a more active role in moderating posts. So this could have

been a response to that intense pressure. Also in August, Anthony Lewandowski received a prison sentence. Now some of you may not know who Lewandowski is. He's an engineer who has focused primarily on autonomous card technology. He joined Google's efforts after running his own startups, and while he was at Google there were stories circulating that he made some ethically questionable business decisions. However, the real trouble began when

Lewandowski left Google. He founded another startup company about autonomous trucking actually, and ultimately Uber acquired that company in but Google executives accused Lewandowski of having illegally downloaded and saved Google documents to a personal device before he left the company, and that Uber was then benefiting from technology that was

owned by Google. Uber would eventually fire Lewandowski in seventeen over All of this and several legal cases would follow with Lewandowski eventually standing trial for the theft of trade c grits. Lewandowski pled guilty to one charge of such theft in August, and the judge sentenced him to eighteen months in prison while dismissing all the other counts. The judge actually kept on commenting on Lewandowski being a genius and having a need for Lewandowski's genius in the world.

I have some opinions about that, but I'll leave it. Oh, and a fun tad bit about Lewandowski. He also established a religion called Way of the Future, which looks to the eventual design and ascension of an artificially intelligent deity. Essentially, the idea is that sooner or later, we're going to create an AI far more capable with dealing with problems than we puny mortals are, and we should prepare the

way for such an entity. I have no idea how sincere Lewandowski is about this endeavor, or if this is an example of, let's say, a creative way to raise funds and attacks exempt environ nament. Because in the United States, religious uh well officially recognized religious organizations are tax exempt, the United States would gain access to Instagram's Reels feature in August. Reels that's r E e l S is essentially Facebook or Instagram's answer to TikTok, and it lets

users record short videos to share an Instagram. From what I can tell, the most popular versions of these videos tend to either be cute little animal videos or young women doing the same five dances over and over. But I'm also old and grouchy, so I acknowledge that this is a technology that wasn't meant for me, and I am out of touch with today's youth, and also get

off my lawn. More seriously, I would argue that this is another example of Facebook trying to fend off any attempts from any other company to pull eyeballs away from face Book and Instagram. TikTok is really popular, particularly with younger people, and every moment someone is looking at TikTok, they're not looking at Instagram or Facebook, and to Facebook,

that's a big problem. Thus we get reels, and I think for some people reels will be really useful as they've already established a big following on Instagram, so they don't have to do all the work all over again on TikTok. But for other people, it will just seem like a lame copycat of an existing service. We saw Uber's delivery service grow to be larger than its rideshare service in August. Now that isn't that big of a

surprise for a world that's affected by the pandemic. Fewer people were going out needing a ride to places, and lots of folks needed stuff to be delivered to them, so all of this tracks, but it marked a big shift in the company's momentum. Keep in mind, however, that Uber has never been profitable, not since it was first launched. Uber doesn't pull enough revenue to cover all its costs, which means the company needs regular cash injections from investors

in order to keep going. Company executives say that Uber uses much of its earnings to invest in growth, and that's where the problem is. That Uber is is spending money in order to grow larger, and if they didn't, then the company would be profitable. Interestingly, way back in February, Uber executive said that they saw the potential to be profitable by the end of and then the rest of happened. But hey, you know, it's complicated and you can't predict

the pandemic also around this time, and could grief. I can't believe this happened this year because it feels like it was a lifetime ago. President Trump issued an executive order that was demanding services like TikTok and we Chat, W E, C, H A T would receive bands from operating in the United States unless their respective parent companies, both of them Chinese companies, were to divest themselves of those properties. The initial order created a deadline of forty

five days. Questions immediately popped up over whether the president actually had the authority to do this or to enforce it, and a lot of eyes were on TikTok and to a lesser extent, we Chat to see what would happen next. So let's go ahead and follow through with that story. The deadline got an extension, mostly due to the Trump administration not actually taking the steps necessary to do anything

about TikTok after it remained with its parent company. Meanwhile, TikTok pursued a court case to get a judgment on the legality of the order in the first place. A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against the band, so that removed that threat and then in November, the US Commerce Department issued a statement that said it wouldn't enforce the executive order abiding by the judges injunction. And then in early December, a second federal judge issued another preliminary

injunction against any bands on the service within the United States. Now, the matter is not yet settled. The President's efforts largely

have been ineffective so far. It probably doesn't help that there's a story from back in June about TikTok users securing tickets to a Trump rally, and they subsequently did not go to that Trump rally, so that inflated the pre event attendance numbers made a look like the event was going to be a sellout, but then it was only modestly attended, and that was a big uh, kind of a big thumb, thumb to the nose toward the president.

So a lot of folks speculated that at least part of the reason that Trump's actions against TikTok were the way they were was because of a personal vendetta. Now, whether that's true or not, his attempts to ban it in the US have so far failed to make any real ground. Even attempts to have American companies take over at least some ownership of TikTok have sort of stalled out.

Early on, Microsoft was in the mix. We all thought that Microsoft might actually acquire the US branch of TikTok, but more recently it was a combo of Oracle and Walmart. The deadline for byte Dance b y t e Dance, TikTok's Chinese parent company to sell to those American companies was back on December four, which came and went without

any such transaction. And of course later this month in January, will have a new president here in the United States and we may see a very different approach or maybe not not doing a predictions episode, so we'll see another big tech story. One I covered last year was the battle between Epic Games and Apple, and to be clear, Google was also in this fight, but pretty much all the media attention has been on Apple and Epic So what is going on? Well, first, we have to understand

a major part of Apple's business plan. If there is any sort of monetary exchange, either to purchase an app from the app store or to make purchases within an app, and that last part is important. It has to all be within an app, then Apple will get a thirty percent cut of those transactions. And when I say in app purchases, I do mean that the experience or the

result of the purchase is also within the app. If you make an app that allows you to order physical services or goods that are outside the app, like a ride hailing app right like Uber or lift, or Airbnb's booking app or delivery service app, those in app transactions are exempt from that cut. But if you are to say, create a game, and you create a game where players can buy something within the game itself, you know, maybe the change the way the game looks or plays that

would qualify for that thirty percent cut. Well, Epic Games makes a lot of stuff, including the game Fortnite and Play by the Rules. It would mean that when gamers would purchase in game currency and Fortnite to spend on stuff like character skins, which are just cosmetic changes within the game, Apple would get a thirty cut of that transaction. Google, by the way, does something similar, so Epic decided to

do a little sidestep. Epic created a way for gamers to buy in game currency outside of the Apple and Google apps themselves, but then they could use that currency within the apps, and they encouraged players to do that. They said, you can buy your currency within the app, or you can come out of the app and buy it there. And essentially they were saying, it's going to get more expensive within the app because the fact that these companies take a cut means we get less money.

So we're losing money on the deal. We're gonna have to make it more expensive. It just makes more sense if you buy the currency this other way. That way you don't have to spend as much to get a certain amount of virtual currency. So that was the the scheme, and Apple did not take this attempt to bypass in app purchases kindly, and they quickly removed Fortnite from the

app store. Moreover, the company threatened to cut Epic off from developing for iOS devices entirely, which would mean that not only would the game never receive another update, other stuff like a popular game engine used by lots of different game developers, not just Epic, would end up going unsupported because Epic oversees it. So Epic argue that this measure was overreach and it represented any competitive and monopolistic practices.

The matter went to court with judges ultimately decided that while Apple has no obligation to return Fortnite to the App Store, so that that ban is still in place, Apple cannot go so far as to block all development on iOS from Epic. Now that battle continues today, with Epic leading a pr campaign to try and get influencers to buy into a boycott of Apple products. More legal battles are to come, and recently a judge denied Apple's request to place limits on how much Apple CEO Tim

Cook will have to testify at the trial. They were trying to restrict it to a certain number of hours of testimony, and the judge said, no, you can't do that. Also distantly related to all this, Apple announced in November that it would cut that commission in half to for small app makers, which Apple defines as makers who have made less than one million dollars in net sales. Now, the step just a bit out of the United States, because I know these episodes have been almost almost exclusively

US focused. In mid August, a cyber attack in Canada necessitated the government to shut down most government operated online accounts. Reports were circulating that at the peak of the attack, there were as many as three hundred thousand attempts to

gain unauthorized access of government accounts. The attackers were using a method called credenti shoal stuffing, in which they had gained access to user names and passwords through other means such as fishing and you know, uh, social manipulation, and they were using those credentials on the various Canadian government sites and services. And it was a very bad time for this to happen, as many Canadian citizens were dependent

upon government sites to get aid during the pandemic. And towards the end of August, Elon Musk showed off a brain computer interface. His team had implanted a prototype of the neuralink device that they've been working on, and the prototype was in a pig named Gertrude. The goal is to create a ship that can allow someone to interact with computer systems through thought alone, and would be useful for people who have a severe lack of mobility or

other challenges. And of course, I think it's also a sign that certain people have a hope that they can find a way to boost human capabilities and intelligence through computer assistance in the future and have it be a two way streets, not just sending commands to a computer, but a computer sending useful information back to the human brain.

Computer interfaces themselves are not new, but traditionally they are pretty large systems, and they take a lot of time to train both the person who's using it and the system itself to work together, and they require invasive brain surgery, and generally they are fairly uh modest in capabilities. Those capabilities can have enormous benefits to people who otherwise are immobile, but it's not like suddenly being able to access the

Internet just through your brain. When we come back, we'll move into the fall of but first let's take a quick break. In September twenty twenty, we saw that Zoom was going through a zoom boom for reals, because their profit was up three thousand three And this is sort

of the opposite of what had happened to Quimby. The use case for Zoom was a perfect fit for people who suddenly we're finding themselves working from home, and more than a few companies by this point in the year we're talking about how even in a post pandemic world, a lot of employees might still work from home in

the future. I suspect Once all the dust settles from COVID, we're gonna see some new big challenges, not the least of which will be in the corporate real estate world, where companies will question whether or not they need to maintain expensive office space on their ledgers. Moving forward, one thing that may have changed since I recorded this episode is the outcome of a struggle between Australia's government and

Facebook and Google. Not the heart of the matter is the Australian media and a determination to make Google and face but pay to make use of the original content created by Australian media. The proposed legislation, which is not yet passed as I record, this would create a negotiation space for the media companies and these platforms to come together to determine how much value the content represents. Facebook

and Google have been resisting and objecting to this. They have said they're worried it would set a global precedent. The Australian government hasn't put up but with much goof from them. They have pointed out that these companies are raking in enormous amounts of revenue in Australia. For Google, it's in the billions of dollars, while local media outlets are starting to dry up, and the whole issue is

a complicated one. Honestly, I would need a lot more of research to really get to the core of what is going on here and what the salient arguments are for either side. But perhaps by the time you hear this, the Australian government will have enact did this law, or

amended it, or maybe even dismissed it. Samsung launched a foldable smartphone in September that retails for one thousand nine dollars a princely some Samsung has had a bit of a rocky past with foldable phones, having been burnt in twenty nineteen after releasing review models to tech journalists, only to recall them a day later due to various issues with the phone's durability. But now Samsung has a few

different folding phones in different formats on the market. Uber announced in September that by twenty the company would only offer rides in electric vehicles in the US and Europe. It was going to go electric only within a decade. That's kind of interesting now. The company further stated its goal was to be emissions free by twenty forty. The announcements timing was likely a response to a report that found that Uber vehicles are less climate efficient than the

average vehicle on the road. So I think that this is a bold move by Uber and one that's important, and it's important to acknowledge the responsibility of the company to help reduce carbon emissions. But it's also in response to the fact that it turns out that Uber vehicles and presumably other ride sharing vehicles are generating a lot more carbon because those vehicles are in motion so much more than your average one. Here's a bit of news

that I didn't hear about when it actually happened. In mid September twenty twenty, sales of vinyl record albums were greater than compact disc sales for the first time since the nineteen eighties. Now, granted, the purchase of physical media in general has been in decline for several years now. Most of us are accessing our music on streaming services rather than purchasing physical albums. But still, as someone who loves vinyl and occasionally collects a little bit of it,

I have a very model collection. I don't I'm not one of those people who has like a garage stuffed with records, but This kind of gave me the warm fuzzies. The Mega Corporation soft Bank sold the British semiconductor chip company ARM two VideA for forty billion dollars in September. You can learn more about ARM and a couple of episodes are recorded back in so check the archives because

it is a fascinating company and a great story. Nintendo announced it would discontinue the Nintendo three DS handheld console in September. I remember being at E three a decade ago and seeing the debut of the three DS. The three D S line was the successor to the older Nintendo d S systems and traces its lineage back to

the old Game Boy days. The announcement meant that Nintendo would be focusing solely on the Nintendo Switch from a hardware standpoint, so that line of handheld consoles is no more. Sticking with game news, Microsoft and it was acquiring a company called Zeni Max for seven point five billion dollars, which might not mean much to most people, but Zenni Max is the parent company to Bethesda, a famous video

game development studio. Bethesda is known for series like the recent Doom games, uh for the Fallout games and for the Elder Scrolls games. In recent years, the company has put out a few games that have received a mixed reception, or, as was the case with Fallout seventy six, a largely negative reaction. Now Bethesda joins other acquisitions like Bungee, the company that created the Halo franchise, by becoming part of

the Microsoft family. Analysts saw this as a huge win for Microsoft, which would be able to bring Bethesda's catalog of games to the Game Pass service, which is an ongoing subscription service that gives gamers access to a wide range of games without having to purchase the individual titles. Moving on into October, now we're making some progress. We saw some new hardware from Google and Apple debut in October.

Google introduced the Pixel five G smartphone, which seemed to indicate that Google was backing away from the super expensive luxury phone market. Well, you might spend a thousand dollars or more on a premium smartphone from other companies. Google's new Pixel five G flagship phone has the bargain budget price of SIS. Don't get me wrong, that is still expensive, but it's no longer priced in that high range of phones on the market. And as the name indicates, it's

compatible with five G networks. And a couple of weeks after that, Apple held its virtual Event to announce four new iPhone models. So on the low end you have the iPhone twelve Mini, which, like the Pixel five G, starts at six. On the other end of the spectrum is the iPhone twelve Pro Max, which has a starting price of a thousand dollars and it goes up from there depending on which model you get. The phone has all the features that you've come to expect on an iPhone,

including incredible cameras. The iPhone twelve Pro and Pro Max both have three cameras on the back of the phone. The other two models have two cameras on the back. Here in Atlanta, we learned that our local American football team, the Falcons, would be playing home games in the stadium that would be disinfected by drones, which is a weird

sentence that I didn't think I would ever say. The stadium partnered with Lucid Drone Technologies to use drones designated D one to distribute disinfectant over the seats, handrails, and other parts of the stadium where the audience would sit or the fans. The drones have a sort of mister or sprinkler attachment on either side of the body that points downward, so it flies above these areas and sprays disinfectant downward. I am not sure how well this works.

Anyone who knows me knows I get a bit head up about big public gatherings in this time, even under controlled circumstances. But I'm gonna let that drop. I realized I'm just one voice out there. Um. But be safe, guys, you know, just be safe. John McAfee, the guy who founded McFee anti virus software, was arrested in Spain in October.

McAfee has quite the checkered past, having been involved in a murder investigation at one point, but he was arrested on the charge of tax evasion, same thing they got Capone for. The US government said McAfee willfully did not file tax returns for several years in the United States. Also interesting, at one point, McAfee had declared he was running for president for the sixteen election. Didn't really go anywhere, but he announced his his candidacy at one point. Anyway,

He's still in Spain. He's in prison awaiting extradition hearings. While he's there. Um, he just has been further remanded into the custody of Spanish prisons after appealing that and losing that appeal. One interesting story from October was the discovery of pieces of a jet engine buried in Greenland's ice sheet. Now, to be clear, we knew there were pieces of a jet engine down there somewhere. This was not like discovering an ancient cave and oh my gosh,

for some reason, there's an xbox in here. Aliens no no back in an airbus jet was flying over Greenland when one of its four engines suffered a catastrophic failure and part of the engine broke off. Now that jet managed to have a safe emergency landing in Canada. No one was hurt, but for years people were searching for these pieces of jet engine parts in Greenland in order to do a full investigation into what actually caused the failure.

The prevailing hypothesis was that the engine had suffered some damage during maintenance operations on the ground. The pieces were found in late twenty twenty, and after close examination, it appears that maintenance was not the issue, but rather that the metal used to hold the jet engines fan in place was weak and it broke apart. And companies had already started to address this particular issue uh in the in the years between when it happened and when we

found the pieces and made the investigation. But it prompted a new discussion about needing more rigorous standards and tests for jet engine manufacturing processes. Moving forward, Here's a terrible story in a year of terrible stories. Hackers were able to access confidential medical records of patients undergoing psychotherapy treatment

in Finland. Their records included personal identification addresses, as well as some details about the patient's condition, though they did not include thorough notes or doctor patient discussions, but certainly enough information to potentially be harmful. The hackers sent emails in two various patients demanding that they be paid a

ransom or else they would make the information public. And y'all, that is some seriously awful stuff going on right there, because getting help just on its own can be very hard, and it requires people to put a lot of trust into systems and health care professionals. So in action like this isn't just predatory, it's abusive and harmful to the people who had to overcome the stigma of seeking help

for for mental health issues in the first place. Authorities recommended that patients not agree to the black tailor's terms and said that there was no guarantee that their data would remain private even if they did pay them. So if your data isn't guaranteed private either way, you don't go ahead and hand more money over it. Plus any payment would reinforce the idea that this the strategy works

and it would encourage further attacks. Finland's National Bureau of Investigation has been looking into the company, which is called Vastamo, to determine if the company or its officers are accountable for the vulnerability, and in researching this I found the hack actually happened way back in though the extortion notices have been much more recent, with those in possession of the data publishing some of it on the dark web

as proof that they have access. Here's the thing, we don't even necessarily know that the people who are doing the blackmailing are the same ones who did the infiltration in the first place. It could very well be that someone hacked into the system, got access to all that data, made it available, or sold it online and someone else has taken that and they're using it to do the blackmailing.

We just don't know. October was also one month before the US elections, and at this point things were really moving at a frantic pace. You could not go a day without news reports about potential threats to the election system. There were stories of attempted ransomware attacks, there were states that were beefing up their cybersecurity protocols, and peace after peace about the mountain of misinformation campaigns running across various

social platforms. No platform was immune to this. Twitter was faring a little better than Facebook in the public eye, simply because Twitter was taking a slightly more proactive approach to labeling tweets that contained misleading information in them, as well as taking steps to ban accounts uh that were body accounts or or run by members of extremist groups,

White Supreme Assists, and that sort of thing. Facebook finally bowed under the pressure and began to ban q and on groups after the company had been resisting that push to do so for a couple of years. YouTube was still dragging its feet even more regarding taking action against groups that were actively pushing out disinformation campaigns and attempting to promote you know, racist agenda. So YouTube was was

faring even worse than Facebook in this case. It was all really really ugly stuff and still remains that to this day. Like it's not like all this stuff has already been solved. Now, if you're in the United States, you're likely well aware of how all this would play out over the following months. But in case you're not, here's a very quick rundown. President Trump would lose his reelection bid, though it took time for that to be

clear due to lots of complicated reasons. Mostly those boiled down to that there was a very large number of mail in ballots that need to be counted, and several states passed laws that prevented election officials from prepping those ballots at all to be counted ahead of election day itself. But that gets into a whole discussion about optics and politics that doesn't have that much to do with technology.

Trump would then proclaim that he in fact won an election that he lost, and his legal team would travel the United States mounting baseless cases challenging the outcome of the election. The team would lose more than fifty of

those legal cases. In the meantime, Trump would tweet out allegations saying that the various states had failed to protect the election process, while states and heads of various federal agencies said, in fact, due to the enormous amount of pressure caused by stuff like the pandemic and the fears of foreign interference, the process was actually safer than it

had ever been in the history of elections. It is hard to put into words how dangerous it is that the president is the one under mining confidence in the democratic process. Well, the legal cases have nearly all fallen apart completely, the rhetoric continues down the path of misinformation. Okay, we are done with October, and I even covered that election fall out a bit, which so when we come back, we're gonna round out and we're gonna leave that year

behind us. But first let's take a quick break. So in early November, we had the elections. As I mentioned, in California, voters past Proposition twenty two, which gave companies like Uber and Lift and exemption when it comes to calling their workers employees, which was a big win for those companies, not necessarily a big win for the workers. And before that vote, judges were deciding against companies like

Uber and left, but with the passing of Prop. Twenty two, that was no longer an option because now it's law, as opposed to the interpretation of a law. We also learned that Uber had lost nearly six billion dollars in twenty twenty, and remember this was from a report in early November, so there was more to come. Again, Uber is a company that has never seen a profitable year, and it amazes me how companies like this can continue to exist for years after losing so much money year

over year. I mean, I can lose money too, so someone invest a billion bucks into me. Twitter would permanently ban Steve Bannon, the former White House Chief strategist, from ever having an account on Twitter again, and the inciting action in this case was that Bannon had posted a tweet suggesting that Christopher Ray, the director of the FBI, and Dr Anthony Fauci should be beheaded, which, hey, turns out, that a truly despicable thing to do, though apparently not

despicable enough for Facebook to do the same. Zuckerberg said it wasn't enough for a band. Steve Bannon was one of a few people supporting Trump's allegations that Trump actually won the election, despite the fact that you know he lost it. Meanwhile, Steve Bannon, under a criminal investigation, had bigger things to worry about, as his lawyers withdrew from the case, which means he got dumped by his own

legal team. Tesla, the electric car company, introduced its own brand of tequila in November, and guys, seriously, I know is over for you guys as you listen to this, but as I write and record this, I am still in and I want out. Is it nice where you guys are? I mean, a car company rolling out a brand of hard alcohol is pretty dang taboo driving an alcohol. Don't mix, y'all. The tequila, which came in lightning shaped bottles, cost two fifty dollars a pop and sold out quickly.

And seriously, I cannot express how messed up I find all of this. Now. Maybe it's just that I'm old fashioned, I am a bit or you know, ignorant, or however you want to put it. But I suppose you could argue that this is, in a way another nod to the future of self driving cars, in which the car can't come under the influence. But we're not there yet.

Tesla in particular has had some high profile massive failures of its autopilot system being used as a self driving system, and I don't imagine we're gonna have a future anytime soon in which it will be legal to be drunk in a vehicle, just in case there is a scenario in which a human has to take over control. Meanwhile, Virgin hyper loop conducted its first test run with actual human beings inside the passenger compartment of a test capsule

or train car if you prefer. For those not familiar with the hyperlop concept, this was another idea championed by Elon Musk. The original concept was to create a rail system inside a tunnel, and fans would pull most of the air out of the tunnel system and exhaust that into the general atmosphere outside. This would create a very low air pressure environment inside the tunnel itself, and it

would also cut way down on air resistance. A train on the track would use air bearings, which is essentially the idea of blowing air straight down hard enough to create a space between the train and the track so the train floats above the track. Then it would use a linear electric motor as a means of propulsion essentially magnetism.

By not making actual physical contact with the track and by removing most of the air out of the system, you very little resistance and so you would lose very little energy due to friction, which means you could get these things up to incredible speeds without having to spend energy to overcome those resistances. By train, you might be able to travel between San Francisco and Los Angeles in thirty five minutes, which is a trip that would take

you more than six hours to drive. Typically, the hyper loop is a proposed alternative to stuff like short plane flights, So ideally you would use the hyper loop to take over routes where the process of going through an airport, clearing, security, boarding, and d boarding a plane actually takes more time than the flight time of the trip. But this approach also requires an enormous investment to build out the infrastructure, the

rail systems and such. Not to mention, you have to do a ton of work with various federal, state, and local governments to coordinate all of this. But for now we're still in knee tech development phase. So Virgin hyper loop originally started out as hyperlop technologies, then later became hyper Loop one before partnering with Richard Branson's company Virgin Group. The whole story behind the company is interesting, and I've covered a little bit in previous episodes of Tech Stuff.

There's plenty of drama in there, so maybe I'll do a full like deep dive examination of Virgin hyper Loop. But the test we saw in November was the first to have actual human beings a board of test capsule traveling on a test track, and the test was a success. But there's still a ton that has to be done before hyperloop becomes a practical reality. Apple, fresh off its iPhone event in October, held a Mac focused event in

November introducing new computers. I don't have much to say about that except that it was a genuine treat to see John Hodgeman, friend of the I Heart Network, pop up and reprise his role as the PC and to dismissively critique the new line of Mac computers. Ring The security Doorbell Company was in the news in November, and not because of the controversial partnerships the company has formed

with various police departments. Nope, in this case, it's because they had to recall three fifty thousand doorbells after a few of them, you know, caught on fire, which, as I understand, it is not what you want a doorbell to do. Both the PS five and the Xbox Series X and Series S debuted late in The Xbox series consoles have a little bit of a problem in that there are very few compelling exclusive titles available for the systems.

Yet the PS five has a problem in that there just aren't enough consoles and it's devilishly hard to get hold of one. And in the entire year Nintendo Switch has sold really, really well and it still could be hard to find one of those. We learned what former Yahoo CEO and Google executive Marrissa Meyer has been up to. In November of me she and another former Yahoo and Google executive named Henri Kae Torres founded a startup originally called Loumi Labs and then rebranded as Sunshine, and they

launched their first product in November. It's an app called Sunshine Contacts, and it uses AI to help manage contact lists and communication. Now, on the surface, it all sounds like pretty basic stuff, but it really does come in handy. It helps consolidate duplicate entries in your contact list, and consolidate them together so that you have just a single entry for people. It helps keep communication histories at hand

to facilitate communication. So there's a lot of stuff where it's a lot of like the busy work you would have to do on your own in order to keep up to date, and it handles it for you. Uh, not like stupendous, but arguably useful. Moving on into December, and yes, there were a lot of other tech stories that happened in November, but so many of them just tie back into misinformation and the election in particular, and

then antitrust discussions about companies like Facebook. But I've already covered that in these episodes, so let's get back into December now. There was a big focus on new misinformation campaigns, ones that revolve around the vaccines for COVID nineteen. Uh,

there's a lot of cool stuff about the vaccines. Are some of the vaccines and how they were developed, And I think that's gonna necessitate a dedicated episode to talk about stuff like the COVID vaccine in general and then the m r in A vaccines variants of the COVID vaccine in particular. But back to this story, misinformation remains a huge concern. As always, using critical thinking is key when you see information about well anything really, but vaccines

for sure. In the short term, bottom line, vaccines are important. They are a necessary component to protecting more people from COVID. They are not part of some weird mind control conspiracy or anything like that, and if you can get one,

you should. Most states here in the US are implementing a phased rollout for vaccines to make sure the most critical populations received them first, so my plans to get one as soon as I am eligible, as soon as the phase for general accessibility of the vaccine opens up.

In December, after numerous delays, the video game Cyberpunk went on sale, and what followed was a series of pretty scathing reviews due to numerous bugs and glitches in the game, some of which made the game unplayable or they would crash the game without warning. It was bad enough that Sony pulled the game from their PlayStation store. Yikes. The story of the game's development and the rush to publication is one that I am going to cover in a

future episode of tech Stuff. It's another one that makes me feel awful for the developers who clearly worked very hard on something that wasn't ready for public consumption, and now they're facing some of the nastiest criticisms I've seen

in a long time. I think the story here is bigger than that, and it includes stuff like the expectations that we have free games, and the economic model used by game developers that puts them in a bind, and the publishers that lock in release dates, and then even after a couple of delays, they're like, well, no, we have to ship now because we've made the promises too frequently, even though the game's not ready. All of that it's complicated stuff, and we're gonna save it for a future episode.

The company Airbnb became publicly traded in December. It had its I p O, and it sought stock price more than double on its debut on the stock market. That instantly made Airbnb more valuable than the established hotel chains Marriott and Hilton combined. Wow, And this is in a year when a lot of people will cut way back on travel, and Airbnb itself had held some pretty significant layoffs. We learned that Reddit is buying a TikTok competitor called

dub smash. Uh. This is a fairly recent story, so I suspect I'll have more to say about it in a future update. I'll conclude this episode with a sobering story that is still unfolding. There is a software vendor called Solar Winds that has a lot of really big time customers among the major governmental agencies here in the

United States. In December, we learned that hackers had exploited vulnerabilities in a particular Solar Winds product to gain access to information belonging to Solar Winds clients, including those government agencies. And further, the hackers appear to have ties to Russia, and these hacks represent a potentially catastrophic breach of national security.

The Solar Winds p the the hackers targeted is called Oriyan and its purposes to manage various I T resources, and solar Winds has a lot of clients that use Orion, like more than thirty thousand of them. Well, evidence seems to suggest Russia is at the heart of all this. Trump has suggested, without presenting any evidence at all, that

China is behind it. And well, there's not much I can say about this that would be objective and even handed, so I'll just keep it at that, But this is another story that I'm going to have to do a full breakdown on in a future episode. I even have a special guest in mind to bring on for that so that we can really dive into it. The hack hits not just the US government, but numerous big companies as well. The scope of the attack is enormous and

the potential harm is hard to calculate. From what I understand, it might take years to secure systems that have been compromised in this attack. I suspect it's going to lead to some big changes in cybersecurity protocols and also in the vetting of third party software vendors, and I suspect Solar Winds is going to have some pretty rough meetings for the foreseeable future. And that wraps up the news.

As of December twenty five, twenty twenty, which is when I am writing this sentence, I think we're going to see a lot more stories about antitrust investigations and pressure for big companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple to change or face government regulations. Heck, even in China, the government there is looking into antitrust issues with Ali Baba, Big tech might have a pretty rough a couple of other things before we go. However, moving forward, we're going

to have Tech Stuff five days a week. Mondays and Wednesdays will be the normal Tech Stuff format with deep dives on various tech topics, But on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I'm going to rundown more recent headlines and tech news to talk about what's just going on in the tech world and give a little context to those stories. So it'll be a bit different from our typical episodes. Actually, in some ways it may be a little more similar

to this episode. Friday's will still be classic episodes of the show from deep within the archives and back when Tech mostly consisted of rocks, string and a somewhat sketchy business plan, which I guess is not all that different from today. I suppose YEA. 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.