Elon Musk Gets a Lot of Bad News

That's where dragon CON's a big science fiction fantasy convention if you're not familiar, And it seems like all of my friends, like all the people I know, are currently at dragon Con. So I'm getting a little fomo here. But I realized a lot of y'all out there also aren't there, So let us get lost in the warm embrace of tech news. First up, there's an update on

the Telegram CEO Pavel Durov story. So on Wednesday, I published an episode about Telegram, the messaging service, and how French authorities recently detained the CEO, Pavel Durov, after his private plane landed at an airport outside of Paris. Since then, a court has indicted Durov on charges that he has been complicit in numerous criminal activities that have been happening

or facilitated by the Telegram messaging service. So essentially, the legal argument here is that Telegram has mostly hands off policy when it comes to content moderation. They're very lax, they don't do very much content moderation at all, and that this means Telegram is effectively allowing crimes ranging from terrorist acts to the spread of child sexual abuse material

see SAM material. I guess that's repetitive. It's like ATM machine. Moreover, Telegram has a history of denying cooperation with law enforcement officials who are conducting legal investigations into criminal activity, you know, essentially like I've got a legal order for a wiretap

and this organization is not being compliant with it. So, according to the charges, it's not just that Telegram failed to cooperate with law enforcement, but that legally received requests were just outright ignored, and that this amounts to the same thing as assisting criminal activity, thus being complicit. And France also has a law that states that services that provide quote unquote cryptology solutions first have to make legal declarations to France's cybersecurity agency in order to do so.

Legally within France. Now, Telegram does offer end to end encryption services, but it's only for one on one communications. Telegram also allows one to many kind of like Twitter and also chat rooms, so those do not have encryption options, and even for one on one communication, encryption is not on by default, you have to turn it on manually.

Durov has already posted the five million euro bail money that he was hit with, but he has also received orders not to leave France until this matter has been concluded. His brother Nikolai, who is also a co founder of Telegram, also has a warrant out for his arrest in France. I've got a lot of news relating to Elon Musk and his various companies. I mean a lot, Like a lot happened this week, I think just by coincidence. But

let's get through it. First. Up, we have a feud brewing between a Brazilian Supreme Court judge and Elon Musk, which I mean, that's a weird sentence, but Musk has said that this judge, Alexandra de Mores, and I apologize for butchering pronunciation, but that this judge has threatened to incarcerate one of X's legal teams stationed in Brazil. If X did not block some accounts on X that we're operating within Brazil, those accounts, according to this judge, were

spreading misinformation and hate speech. Murkying up the waters is the fact that Elon Musk appeared to be very cozy with kind of a hard right leaning leader of Brazil who is no longer the leader of Brazil, and that the Supreme Court judge is kind of an opposition to that particular political stance. So there's like some political tension going on here beyond this claim that these accounts are

spreading misinformation. Now, Musk ended up replying to this request of Hey, you need to shut this stuff down or I'm going to arrest your lawyers here in Brazil. He responded by shutting down X's offices in Brazil. He just closed those offices outright. However, X is still providing service

in Brazil, it just doesn't maintain any offices there. However, that creates a new legal issue for the company because in Brazil, if you are providing a messaging company a messaging service within the nation, you have to have a presence in Brazil as well. There has to be someone who's held accountable in the country, and by shutting down the offices, Musk no longer has that person. So Maraz could order X to be shut down in Brazil entirely. And he also ordered that the bank accounts for Starlink

business in Brazil to be frozen. So Starlink is the satellite internet service provider business. It's a branch of SpaceX, which of course is another of Elon Musk's companies. And y'all you know I am not a fan of Elon Musk. I mean, I don't make that a secret, but it does seem like a pretty drastic case of overreach if you ask me, because X and Starlink are not part of the same company. They may have the same obnoxious

dude behind them, but they aren't the same company. And to shut down the assets of one company in order to force a different company to follow your your legal rulings, that strikes me as being very wrong. I also think it's important to remember Elon Musk technically he's not the CEO of X anymore. He hasn't been the CEO of X for ages. It's Yakarino who's the CEO. But everyone essentially assumes he's ultimately the one calling the shots over at X, even if Yakarino is nominally CEO. I hate

to even use that phrase. I'm sure Yakarino does a lot of work. I have no idea what her day to day has to be like, nor do I understand what it must be like to work at a company where everyone just assumes that you are a figurehead. And I honestly don't know the extent to which that accusation could be true. It's a crazy world, Elon Musk's world

in particular. Well, if the judge orders X to get shut down in Brazil, presumably the way that would work is he would order Brazilian telecommunications companies to just block all traffic to X within the country, because clearly the judge can't force X to shut down operations in Brazil.

I don't even know how X would do that to begin with, but he could force the various telecommunications companies to block traffic to X. However, people in Brazil could potentially still get to X by using a VPN service that was based outside of the country. Anyway, X and Starlink have both accused the judge of breaking Brazilian law and say they will escalate legal proceedings within the country. I have no idea how that works, because at least here in the United States, once you get up to

the Supreme Court level, there's nowhere else to go. That's that's the top. But it definitely seems to me like the judge is going a little judge dread over there. So I'm sure there's a lot more complex issues at play in this story. Maybe I'll do a full episode about it in the future, because I think it does require a nuanced approach to kind of understand everything that's

going on. I'm sure it's not a black and white situation for either side, But I don't know that freezing of assets for starlink, it just strikes me as like,

how could there be a legal basis for that. I guess if you argue that there was like a single parent company and all these other companies were underneath that, maybe then, but I don't think that's how the corporate structure works between SpaceX and X apart from the fact that they share Elon Musk's you know, obsession with the letter X. Meanwhile, over here in the United States, X, formerly known as Twitter, was kind of a caught out when it marked links to an NPR news story as

being unsafe. So, yeah, X will not block accounts in Brazil because that's a free speech issue, but here in the US, it will label NPR stories as being unsafe. So if you try to find out what the deal is between Donald Trump's staff, campaign staff and an employee of Arlington National Cemetery by following a link to an NPR story on the matter, then you're told, hey, you don't want to do that. This is taking you to

a bad place. The unsafe marker is typically something that pops up if the link is to a site that's known to host like militious software or sometimes things like outright misinformation. Now, NPR might occasionally play some truly terrible jazz on the radio, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it malicious. The warning was in the form of a pop up as well. It wasn't just

like a little label. If you clicked on the link, you would get a pop up and it would say that this link might be unsafe, and then there'd be some text, and underneath that would be a big old blue button that if you clicked on, it would just take you right back to X, so it would, you know, derail you from going to NPR. Beneath that big old blue button is a smaller line of text with a hyperlink that would let you continue on to read the news story. So that is kind of crazy right now.

This could just be a simple mistake, but Musk has already shown contempt for NPR because previously he labeled NPR as a state affiliated media outlet. Typically that label indicates a media company that is controlled by a governmental body, like it's a propaganda arm. In other words, that is not what NPR is. NBR receives a little bit of federal funding, but only a tiny little bit. Most of its funding does not come from federal sources, so and there is no federal oversight or control of what goes

out over NPR. So this was a very misleading label that Musk applied to NPR. Following that NPR chose to leave X. So, you know, Musk has also over the last few years been promoting more right leaning ideologies and personalities on X, so I think it would be very easy to view this and see it as a purposeful attempt to discourage X users from going to NPR to

read up about this incident that happened at Arlington National Cemetery. However, X state that the labeling was actually a false positive, that this was not intentional, it was an honest mistake. Maybe that's true, Like, it's easy for me to believe that it was an intentional move to try and dissuade people from reading up about what happened at Arlington National Cemetery.

But it's also very much true that over the last year X has has eliminated so many people from the company payroll that mistakes like this could easily happen simply because they don't have the people to make sure it doesn't happen. So either version could be true. Okay, so

we've got stories about X and Starlink. What about Tesla, Well, there's more bad news on that, So Tesla, of course yet another elon Musk company, and Christian Agatti of autoevolution dot Com has an article titled third documented Tesla cybertruck fire in less than a month raises questions woof so a gad points out that in the marketing push for cyber truck, Tesla was really stressing how the cyber truck

is a resilient vehicle right now. Granted, in the midst of trying to say the cyber truck could withstand tons of abuse, they accidentally broke some of the cyber truck's windows while trying to show how tough they are. That was a whoopsie, but anyway, the most recent of these fires happened after an accident in which a cyber truck

driver hit a fire hydrant. My guess is that then caused the battery inside the cyber truck to experience a short where there was damage to the battery, and that that created a short circuit that led to overheating and then fire. That's my guess. I don't know for sure that that is what happened. There has yet to have been an investigation, or at least results of an investigation shared publicly, so maybe it turns out something else caused the fire. This happened in Harlingen, Texas. Don't know if

that's how you say it. There are a lot of places in Texas where I think it's pronounced one way. I am totally wrong. Earlier in the month, however, news broke about a different incident that happened in Bayton area, which is also in Texas, and In that one, a cyber truck ran into like a concrete ditch trench or something and caught fire. Tragically, there was a fatality, although last I saw, they had not yet determined what actually caused the death, whether it was a medical emergency, the

accident itself, or the fire. The third fire incident that was one where Agady reported that a colleague of his had actually found a burnt cyber truck listed on an online auction site, and the description indicated that the vehicle had been in a wreck and in fact subsequently caught fire, and that this happened in Houston, Texas. So three accidents resulting in fires, all three happening in Texas in the

span of a month. Now, I think it's too early to draw any firm conclusions as to whether this means the cyber truck actually is a flawed vehicle in that regard, you know, like if the panels protecting the electric battery aren't sufficient or whatever. I just don't know that that's the case. It could be, but I think we need to have an actual investigation to determine that. So I

think that's probably going to happen. I mean, with three fires in a month, it seems to me like it's at least warranted to take a look and see if there are any common factors here at play. Maybe there aren't. Maybe this is just coincidence and it all happened around the same state and within the same month. That's possible, so we need to investigate to find out. Okay, we got lots more news to get through. Let's take a

quick break to thank our sponsors. We're back, and now we're not done with Elon Musk news items just yet. So over at SpaceX, there was a different kind of setback. Now, while I'm talking about space and SpaceX, I should also give a quick update and mention that we have this ongoing issue of the two astronauts who went up on the Boeing star Liner that then docked with the International Space Station for a couple of months. Now. NASA was hoping to find a way where they could return the

astronauts to Earth aboard the star Liner spacecraft. That was something that Boeing was saying would be within acceptable risk parameters, but NASA engineers ultimately disagreed with that. So the official decision is that the Starliner is going to return to Earth empty and the two astronauts will return home early

next year aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule. Now, the SpaceX story I wanted to touch on for this week is that on Wednesday of this week, a Falcon nine first stage booster had a big ol' whoopsie when it returned to land on an ocean platform. Now, as I'm sure you're all aware, one of the big draws for SpaceX's

launch vehicles is that they are reusable. This cuts way down on the cost of launch, which is a huge limiting factor for space The first stage booster landed on this ocean platform, but then shortly thereafter it fell over and it burst into flames. Fortunately, there were no reports of any injuries or anything like that. There were no reports of any public damage from this particular incident. However,

the FAA has grounded the Falcon nine launch vehicles. SpaceX can investigate the incident and then share its findings and then after any corrective actions have been ordered as a result of that investigation. That means no SpaceX launches until the FAA lifts that order. And that also means there was supposed to be a launch I think today actually that was going to deliver more Starlink satellites into orbit,

and that has since been delayed. Actually, the booster that burst into flames, that was part of a mission of sending more Starlink satellites into orbit as well. But the second one that was supposed to happen now has been postponed indefinitely until the ban has been lifted once they figure out exactly what happened with this accident. No telling yet if this is going to impact other upcoming launches.

There are a couple that are coming up before too long, But it may be that this whole thing is resolved relatively quickly. We'll just have to keep an eye out. The hits keep on coming though. From us. In Memphis, Tennessee, the Southern Environmental Law Center alleges that Musk's AI company, which of course is called Xai, is using natural gas burning turbines to power the AI facilities. We all know that these AI data centers require a huge amount of

electricity in order to work. So one of the things that companies that are using these kinds of power sources that like natural gas burning turbines, one of the things they're supposed to do is file a whole bunch of paperwork to get the right permits to actually operate that kind of machinery, and according to the Southern Environmental Law Center, they say that there's no record that Xai actually followed

that process in Tennessee. So in an open letter, the organization claims that Xai has twenty gas turbines operating without first applying for those permits and has called upon the local health department to investigate Xai to determine if, in fact, that is what is going on now. I can't say I would be surprised to hear that a Musk backed company jumped into a situation like that without proper paperwork,

but I have to be fair. That is my bias talking, Like just because Musk has proven that, you know, he's done that kind of thing before, it doesn't mean that that's what's happened this time. It could all be totally a misunderstanding, like maybe the paperwork has been filed and

they just didn't find record of it. But they are calling for an investigation to find out if the company in fact followed the right process in order to operate this way, because the concern here is that the operation of these twenty gas turbines could contribute to pollution in the Memphis area. Meanwhile, the Center for Countering Digital Hate released the results of a study focusing on the GROCK AI assistant that's the AI assistant connected to YEP, formerly

known as Twitter. YadA YadA, YadA so. This study concluded that GROC lacks sufficient guardrails to prevent people from using it to generate misleading images of real public personas, including politicians. The study said that the tool was able to create a convincing fake image of Donald Trump appearing to be very sick in a hospital bed, and another of Kamala

Harris appearing to do drugs. The researcher said they tried various methods to generate these images that range from just blatantly giving a text prompt asking for what they wanted to see, to taking a more circumspect route where they used descriptive language to get the same effect, to get the same results they wanted without actually triggering any preventative safety features that otherwise would stop that kind of request

from working. I find this particularly frustrating, not just because of the disinformation aspect, which is clearly bad enough alone, but also because Elon Musk like again, I don't like the guy, but he has repeatedly sounded the alarm about the dangers of AI, and I agree AI is potentially very dangerous if it's implemented poorly. And he has argued that AI needs to be developed and deployed responsibly. I

agree with that too. I think that AI does need to be developed and deployed responsibly, and that there should be plentiful safety measures in place to prevent AI from causing harm. I agree with that. All of these things I agree with, And yet here is an AI tool on one of Elon Musk's own platforms that clearly fails to follow any of those directives. But then you could also make the same argument that the AI found in Tesla vehicles has at least appeared to be less reliable

than the company tends to market to potential customers. So there's that as well. There's also been a recent change to Grock, the AI assistant on it, apparently in response to a complaint letter sent to the company from the offices of five different Secretaries of State, so those states

would be Minnesota, New Mexico, Washington, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. The offices were complaining that Groc was giving incorrect information in response to prompts asking about ballot deadlines in those states. So essentially this is related to election information, and GROC apparently was just giving incorrect responses when people were asking

these basic questions about ballots. So now rather than just giving an incorrect answer, GROC will respond to those kinds of requests by urging the visitor to go to vote dot gov for the actual answer, So that I think is a market improvement. Tom David S. Pumpkins Hanks has a message for all of y'all out there, and that message is to not trust drug advertisements that seem to

have Tom Hanks voicing the ad copy. So specifically, on Instagram, Hanks posted quote, there are multiple ads over the internet falsely using my name, likeness, and voice promoting miracle cures and wonder drugs. These ads have been created without my consent, fraudulently and through AI. I have nothing to do with these posts, or the productions and treatments, or the spokespeople touting these cures. I have Type two diabetes and I only work with my board certified doctor regarding my treatment.

Do not be fooled, Do not be swindled, Do not lose your hard earned money. End quote. Now, if all this sounds a little familiar, that might be because of something that happened around the same time last year, where there was this ad video going around with an AI generated deep fake version of Tom Hanks prom voting a dental plan Lisa needs braces dental plan. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Some episodes of The Simpsons are kind of hardwired into my brain and I just go into like a feedback loop.

I have to admit that when I was thinking about how deep fakes were going to spread beyond the creation of pornographic images and video, which is its own thing and it's horrifying and terrible, when I was thinking about how it was going to branch out beyond that, I had not clocked Tom Hanks as being one of the

first high profile victims. But here we are. Bloomberg reported that Apple is cutting one hundred positions in its digital services department, and that the affected employees will have two months to find another position within the company or else be struck from the roster entirely. So apparently the main group affected is the books team, which, as Samuel Aksin of Ours Technica has pointed out, has no subscription service

attached to that particular product. So it sounds like Apple really wants to redirect energy towards services that more directly impact revenue. Which I mean, you can understand that from a business perspective, right, Like, why would you focus on things that don't impact revenue? Maybe they impact the value or the perception of value, which you could argue is a reasonable reason to keep it going. But yeah, most companies are going to say revenue is way more important.

So it appears that Apple is one of those. I hope anyone who has been affected by this will find a new position with a great team as soon as is possible. It's been a pretty long time since I've talked about Uber getting hit with fines, but this next story is quite a doozy. In fact, according to ngadget's Sarah Fielding, it would be the largest fine Uber has ever faced, a whopping two hundred and ninety million Euro penalty. That's the equivalent of around three hundred and twenty four

million dollars. So what the heck happened? Well, this has to do with the EU and GDPR. GDPR that's the set of rules that are meant to protect EU citizens' personal data. So one thing that companies are not supposed to do under these rules is to send the personal information belonging to EU citizens outside the EU itself unless you're using appropriate measures to make sure you're protecting their information.

This is a thing that a lot of platforms have run into where they were found to be transmitting information to servers in the United States, but the information belonged to EU citizens, and without those protections in place, these companies can't guarantee the safety of that information. Because GDPR is so focused on the safety of personal information, that's

a problem. So the Dutch Data Protection Authority or Dutch DPA says that Uber really failed to protect information for Uber drivers and that included stuff like their taxi licenses, their identity documents and lots more other information. That Uber transmitted this info overseas to Uber data servers in the United States while not using any approved transferred tools that are meant to ensure the safety of those data transfers.

The Dutch DPA said this failure to provide adequate protection is a violation and that Uber subsequently has to pay up. And it's notable here that as far as I can tell, no unauthorized individuals ever got access to this information. This isn't like a data breach or something, so it's not that, you know, Uber failed to protect the info and someone

got hold of it. It's that Uber was not following the approved process to make sure data was handled appropriately, so arguably that personal information could have been intercepted or exploited by other parties. And Uber reps have said that the company will of course appeal the fine, so we'll have to see where this develops from here. Okay, I've got some more news stories to talk about. Before we

get to those, let's take another quick break. Okay, let's wrap up some of our tech news this week over on blue Sky, which, in case you're not familiar with blue Sky, it's an alternative to Twitter, slash x, along with other similar tools like Mastodon or threads. So blue Sky has added some new anti toxicity features and I think the features are interesting. I'm not sure that it's the best approach, but they are interesting. It's hard to determine how to best implement anti toxicity measures on a

platform that allows people to just join up. I mean, as platforms get larger, they become more difficult to moderate, assuming that you have a platform that's interested in moderation in the first place. So yeah, I see also Telegram. But the big one that I wanted to talk about was that users are able now to remove their original post if someone else quotes that post. So in other words, let's say, let's say that you post something that says like,

I really enjoyed the Barbie movie, which is awesome. Honestly, I enjoyed the Barbie movie. But let's say that I'm not me. Let's say that I am the Evil Mirror Universe version of me, and I've decided, because you have claimed that you enjoyed the Barbie movie, you are deserving of criticism and trolling and all that kind of stuff. So I then quote your post, and I then put some really nasty commentary underneath about how I think you're

a dumb dumb for liking a perfectly good movie. And now you can actually take action on this, so before you might just end up being flooded with like toxic notifications, let's say that Evil Mirror Universe me has a lot more notoriety and a lot more followers on Blue Sky. So I post this negative takedown of your post and everyone dogpiles on top of you. Now on Blue Sky, you could go in and remove the quoted tweet from

my post. So you know, if my post is centered around your earlier post, and you remove your earlier post from mine, then all it's left is the commentary. If that commentary is not specific, people don't even know who I'm referring to as I rant about someone daring to like the Barbie movie. So that is effective now, granted, if in my narrative, if in my common Harry I have also identified you, then removing your post from the quotation doesn't really help that much because people can still

see who I'm talking about. Maybe they don't get a link to your profile or whatever, but there's limited utility here. But yeah, I think that that's generally a positive step. I'm not sure that's the most effective one, but it is meant to prevent instances of dog piling. So that if someone takes your post and then, out of context, tries to argue that you're a terrible person or whatever, you can just remove the quotation part out of that post.

Now you can't touch anything else that's in that post, right, Like, if in my description, I really drag you. You can't go in and change my description, like you can't change the commentary I have added. You can just remove the quoted part, which I think makes sense, Like you shouldn't have the ability to be able to change what someone's post reads, because then it's just chaos. But I think it is a good step. I just think it's tough,

like this is a hard problem to fix. Another similar feature on blue Sky is that you can actually hide replies to your posts. So let's say you post something and no one's quoting you, but they are replying to you, and some of them are being real nasty. You can actually hide those replies, and you can choose to hide it just from yourself, which is like blocking or muting someone, or you can choose to hide that reply from everybody so no one can see that this person is just

being nasty towards you. So when someone's being hateful, you can hide so that no one sees it. Or maybe you just shield yourself and you let it stand for everybody else. Blue Sky says it will continue to introduce features to make the platform a more safe and welcoming place. This I think is in stark contrast to X like over at X. You don't really see a Musk and company putting in measures to make X a safer and

more welcoming place. You do occasionally see stories like the one I mentioned about NPR, where it appears that whenever they do enter into content moderation, it's to suppress any any kind of viewpoint that doesn't go into alignment with what Musk believes. That at least that's the appearance. Whether that's what's really going on or not, I don't know.

Like I said, it could really be that there was just an error in a false positive, But yeah, Blue Sky strikes me as taking kind of like a maybe not a total one to eighty approach from X, but a substantial deviation from that approach. The Motion Picture Association announced this week that through partnering with authorities in Vietnam, they have shut down an online media piracy ring that had accumulated billions of visits between them from January twenty

twenty three up to June twenty twenty four. So sort of the hub of this, like the central crux was F Movies, and under F Movies, there were several piracy sites that were in operation. They included any Wave Flicks Tours my Flixer and others like that. So the MPa referred to f Movies as the mothership of piracy and that the takedown had a cascading effect across these various piracy sites which have been hosting media illegally for years

and distributing it to whomever goes there. Various media companies and organizations that represent media companies have spent decades fighting online piracy, often in ways that end up being outlandishly disproportionate. Like you might remember, I mean I remember because I remember the nineties when the RIAA really began to shake down like service pro like Verizon to hand over the identities of customers that the RIAA suspected were guilty of piracy.

There are people who were hit with truly ridiculous, astronomic fines for piracy. And then there's the various issue of media organizations arguing that piracy equates to loss of revenue, like if you watch a movie illegally, if you download a music track illegally, that means we lost revenue. A lot of entities, including the United States Government Accountability Office, say that argument doesn't hold water. At best, it is misleading.

At worst, it is wrong, and that's because it's impossible to determine if someone who pirated a piece of media otherwise would have purchased that piece of media legally. Let's say that piracy was impossible somehow, Like we're in a world where it's just impossible to pirate stuff. Someone who would have pirated things, you can't say that they will, though otherwise go out and buy it. Maybe they just

go without. You can't make the argument that a downloaded piece of media equates to loss of revenue, So a lost sale isn't the same thing as stolen money. Like if I walk up to a movie theater and I look at the list of films that are available, and I ultimately decide, eh, I don't feel like watching any of these, and I walk off. I didn't steal from any of the movie companies. So yeah, I think piracy is bad. Just to be clear, I do think piracy is bad. I do not think you should do it.

Don't be a pirate. However, I think media companies that take the nuclear option based on unsupportable arguments are bad too. No one's in the right in that particular situation. But you can read more about this particular story about the Motion Picture Association and f movies both On Technica and The Verge. Both sites have some great articles about this recent Hollywood war against online piracy. I recommend you go

check those out now. For other recommended reading this week, I've got a couple of different pieces I want to talk about. First up is a paper that was published in Nature, the science journal Nature. This paper is by Valentine Hoffmann, Pratyusha rha Kaluri, Dan Jorowski, and Sharise King. It is titled AI generates covertly racist decisions about people

based on their dialect. So, as you might suspect, this paper investigates the issue of bias found within AI models, but this time with regard to dialect as opposed to say,

physical features. I think it's a really important piece, particularly since we live in a world in which code switching is a really important mechanism for navigating different cultural groups for a lot of people, and if they are switched into one particular culture, it's entirely possible that an AI model is going to make some very racist conclusions based on that anyway. Next up would be a piece by Heather Knight and Kate Conger of The New York Times

titled Elon Musk's X is leaving San Francisco. City officials say good riddance. So this story covers how X, which has long had its HQ in San Francisco, California, is now moving to other parts of California, like it's going to rely on offices that are in other cities in California, but the HQ itself is relocating to Texas, And how some people who are in various positions in San Francisco

government aren't exactly wringing their hands at x's departure. Then finally, there's a concerning article in The Texas Observer by Francesca du Nunzio titled Texas State Police gear up for massive

expansion of surveillance tech. It serves as a reminder that it's very important to hold law enforcement agencies accountable and to investigate whether their reliance on certain technologies is merited, particularly since some of those technologies have proven to have flaws that can lead to disproportionate harm being done to vulnerable populations. Specifically, I'm thinking about things like facial recognition technologies and how that often can disproportionately affect innocent people

from the black community. We've seen that happen numerous times, So any surveillance state stuff always makes me nervous. It's also wild that Texas identity is so strange to me because there's kind of ingrained in Texas is this idea of independence and being able to stand on your own, to hike yourself up by your bootstraps, and that you know, like a lot of the narrative around Texas government is about being self sufficient. I mean the state of Texas.

Their power grid is independent of the national power grid in the United States, for example. So you've got this idea of individualism and self sufficiency, and on the flip side, you've got this growing surveillance state in law enforcement, and the two don't really gel together to me, apart from a slow moved more toward authoritarianism, which I think is pretty concerning you. But the tech enabling that is really the feature of that particular article, So check that out.

I hope all of you have a great weekend here in the United States, the holiday weekend. I hope you have a great holiday if you're here in the US. If you're not in the US, I hope you just have a great weekend period. And I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite show still